Ode to the fires.

I thought I might share this writing from a friend who lost her home in the Taos area many years ago...In light of all the destruction and deaths from fires and the changing climate.

I am an early bird, blessed with an innate affinity with morning. Dawn is my church. First light is a touchstone, a sacred time that spreads a nourishing flood of grace throughout my bones and blood. At dawn, I am filled with the quiet light of hope.

This morning, I see and smell the lingering smoke from far away fires. Even in the midst of this, I feel the sacredness and hope. This feeling does not come lightly, for I have a very personal history with fire. I too have lost from it. Two dear homes were burned to the ground, one by a forest fire. And a third time, there was a near escape when my partner and I took down our tipi shortly before a fire swept through the canyon where we lived.

I have never lost a beloved person to fire, and am not speaking to that. But I have lost much. I have seen my earthly abode and possessions turned to ash. I saw forests of familiar trees turned to regiments of black sticks. The fragrant, earthly landscape of my neighborhood became inescapably grey and lunar. The bitterly pungent smell that lingers after a fire is indelible in me.

My heart is with those who have lost. I will repost a story/poem I wrote about the Lama Fire, which happened some twenty or so years ago. It is dedicated to you, to those who love you, and to our beloved land and all the creatures that have lived upon it.

“a storm of its own"

she awakens
to a windy spring day
with the wisp of a dream
lingering:
the dark arm of a neighbor, 
his hand sharply motioning 
away! time to go!

puzzled, 
she brushes the dream aside
and rises, 
looking out the window,
up the strong and familiar mountain
furred by a multitude of trees.

she is drawn outside,
into the sage filled yard,
a bowl of corn porridge cradled in her hand.
she sits in the rocker
and eats in the sun.

the wind 
has an irritating edge
as the morning moves on.

her dog barks, tail wagging,
and she gets up to greet a visitor.
in the midst of a hug, 
a glimpse of smoke 
on the horizon--
and deep inside 
she feels the stirrings
of change.

up the ladder to the roof,
they scan with binoculars,
then call neighbors,
and trundle down the dirt road 
for a closer look.
the smoke is coming from behind a ridge
several miles away,
but the wisp is
turning into a blackening column,
quickly gathering power,
spun on 
by the wind.

the possible loss of a well loved home,
of years of work,
is not something the mind
willingly contemplates.
it stays in a safely distant orbit
while arms carry furniture and clothes to the truck,
while children
are gathered in,
while animals are herded 
down the mountain.

before driving away,
she turns and takes 
one look back:
the column of smoke
is now a staggering, sweltering phenomena,
a mighty hiroshima mushroom, dwarfing
the immense desert and mountain 
landscape.

as her eye lingers,
out of the roiling cloud 
a broad, glinting bolt of lightning
strikes.

the fire 
has created a storm 
of its own.

neighbors gather at the bottom of the road
at the side of the gray highway.
they look up, 
eyes and mouths solemn and closed 
or wild and wide,
some crying and clinging,
others clutching anger 
like a solitary shield.
they have known each other 
long and well.
as they stand together, 
this witnessed power, 
roaring and unquestionable,
heaves the earth beneath their feet.

days later, 
when the roadblock is removed,
she goes home.
her driveway is a dirt track 
through a powdery gray moonscape.
the adobe house
a lone chimney 
surrounded by debris
and fallen walls.
even the wood stove, so stout,
built to hold fire,
is hopelessly warped.

out of habit, her feet 
start off down the path,
onto her usual morning walk through the forest.

she is dreading this,
and expects the sadness of the trees
to engulf her.

down through the gulch, 
scrub oaks gone, 
up the other side, to the ponderosas:
miles and rolling hills of straight black sticks
silently standing
in gray ash.

in pure quiet,
she listens.

she has never questioned 
the cycles of life and nature...
the expanding creation
of art and gardens and children, 
the dutiful and detailed maintenance 
of daily life...
but now, she has been yanked
into the edgy territory 
of destruction
and death.
she stands still,
and finally sees
its fierce necessity 
and stark beauty.
and the sorrow she expects to find 
in this former forest
is instead 
an immense feeling 
of clarity and relief.
the accumulated years of weighty growth
are gone.
the place 
is clean.

she moves out of the burnt forest and into the fields,
to the place that was her earthly church.
she sees her cherished grandmother tree,
now fallen.
one more letting go.

she looks down the fields
toward where her home once stood
and the green of the irrigated alfalfa
is shocking against the miles of blackness.
her eyes travel down the slope of them 
and are caught
by a slight movement...
she moves toward it, 
through the moist grassiness,
then stops 
at this sight:
an old man in blue jeans and plaid shirt
is crying.
he is on his knees, 
his eyes 
on a cream colored mare 
standing in emerald clover, 
her new foal, bright and white,
standing daintily beside her.

they are brilliantly set 
against the black remains
of a landscape,
on the fragile, sacred border
between beginning
and end.

***
robin whitley 
la lama, new mexico
9/27/2009

From a long ago classmate of mine...a conservative.

Security Clearances Primer: When my husband retired from The Pentagon, he kept his super secret top security clearance. It allowed him to continue his classified work in what we call "The Dark World" of classified programs for Defense protecting those who protect all of you out there reading this. He met with Generals, Congressmen, testified in Washington before committee's, etc. about the work on classified programs. He may be retired but all that classified information still resides in his head. The Armed Forces committee could call him tomorrow to come testify about any of his programs. His colleagues can consult with him. Just because he retired, doesn't mean the programs he led ended. There is one and only one reason to revoke a security clearance- the individual in some way failed to keep their security oath. I won't bore anyone with the ways that can happen but suffice to say, criticizing the President is NOT one of them. For all of you who keep cheering Trump on no matter what he does, stop and think how you would have responded if President Clinton, Bush, or Obama had abused their power this way. Few of you have any idea of the national security damage and the risk to our intelligence and other sectors he just caused. But we do at our house. Wake up People! This is what dictators do. They silence people who speak out against them by whatever means are at their disposal. What's next? Jailing people? He has crossed the line and it doesn't matter what the state of our economy is or our job markets or your 401K. This is an assault on the institutions that protect YOUR freedom.

The Birth of Predatory Capitalism

How the Free World Took Four Giant Leaps to Self-Destruction

A (successful) American politician who cries: “God is a white supremacist!”Neo-nazis in the Bundestag. The extreme right rising in Italy. Poland’s authoritarians purging its Supreme Court .

How did we get here? To a world where the forces of intolerance and indecency are on the rise, and those of decency, wisdom, and civilization are waning? Is something like a new Dark Age falling?

I think it has everything to do with predatory capitalism, and so I want to tell you a story. Of how it came to be born, in four steps, which span three decades.

During the 2000s, the economy of the rich world underwent something like a phase transition. It became “financialized”, as the jargon goes — which simply means that finance came to make up a greater and greater share of the economy. Hedge funds and investment banks and shady financial vehicles of all kinds went from a modest portion of the economy, to making up a huge chunk of it — around half, in some countries.

Now, what was “financialization” for? What were all these bankers, hedge fund managers, investors, and so on, doing? The answer is: nothing. Nothing of value, anyways. They were simply placing bets…with each other. Bets on bets on bets, meta-bets. Economists, who have something like an inferiority complex, envious of swashbuckling bankers, bought their marketing pitch hog, line, and sinker: “we’re going to reduce risk! Everyone will benefit!” But no such thing was happening — and anyone could see it. Risk was being massively amplified, in fact, because every time a speculator made a billion dollar bet with another, they were both betting with the same pool of money, essentially. Whose money? It wasn’t theirs — it was everyone’s. Pensions, savings, bank accounts, earnings, retirement funds. All that being bet on bets on bets on bets…which amounted to nothing. But what if all the bets went south at once?

First, I want you to really understand that what was happening was a zero-sum game, where one had to lose for another to win. Imagine there are three of us, in a little stone age tribe, with a hundred pebbles each. We spend all day every day finding new ways to lend pebbles to each other, to bet them on who’ll blink first, or even bets on those bets, and so on. In our little economy, does anyone ever end up better off? Does anyone, for example, discover antibiotics, or even invent the wheel? Nope. We’re just fools, who’ll never accomplish, learn, or create anything, sitting around playing a zero-sum game, in which no real value is ever created. The pebbles never become anything more valuable, like, for example, books, symphonies, knowledge, or medicine. All that is exactly what was happening during the phase of financialization.

But financialization didn’t just have a direct cost — no value being created, just men in shiny suits betting pebbles on who’d blink first. It also had an opportunity cost. As finance grew to be a larger and larger share of the economy, so the wind got sucked out of the sails of the “real economy”, as American economists put it, which simply means people doing the work that actually does create value — teachers, nurses, engineers, artisans, bakers, small-town factories, and so on. Think about it simply: the more money that was burned up in speculating, the less that was available for making things of genuine value. So the incomes of all these people — those in the “real economy” — began to stagnate. New schools and hospitals and energy grids and so on weren’t built — all the money was going towards speculating on the backs the old ones, sometimes, often, on their failures. A black hole was growing at the heart of the economy — but according to pundits, it was the sun itself. Everything was upside down. The bets were indeed about to all go south at once — only no one knew understood how or why yet.

How was the real economy to survive, then? Another hidden effect of financialization was super-concentration — the second force in the rise of predatory capitalism. Mom-and-pop capitalism is a healthy and beautiful thing, an economy of a million little shops, bakeries, artisans — but it takes only a modest attachment to a profit motive. But thanks to the rise of massive, global speculation, only aggressive quarterly profit-maximization was allowed. CEO earnings were hitched to share prices, and your share price only went up if your earnings did, relentlessly, illogicaly, crazily, every single quarter, instead of stabilizing at a happy, gentle amount — and so the only way left, in the end, to achieve it, was to build titanic monopolies, which could squeeze people for every dime. Once the economy had Macy’s, JC Penney, K-Mart, Toys-R-Us and Sears. Now it has Walmart. The story was repeated across every single industry. Amazon, Google, Apple. A new age of monopoly arose.

But monopolies had an effect, too. The third force in the rise of predatory capitalism was the implosion of the institution formerly known as the job. Now, just before peak financialization, beginning in the 1990s, many jobs were “offshored.” That’s a polite way to say that the speculators above discovered that companies were more profitable when they evaded as much of human civilization as possible. Find a country with no labour laws, no protections, no standards, no rule of law at all, in fact — and send jobs there. That way, you wouldn’t have to pay for pensions, healthcare, childcare, insurance, and so on. Cost savings! Efficiency! Synergies, even — you could make everything in that one sweatshop.

We’re used to thinking that offshoring “took” jobs in rich countries. But the truth is subtler — and more ruinous. They blew apart the idea of a job as we used to know it. As jobs went to countries without good governance, decent labour laws, a boomerang effect happened. The machine discovered that it could do in rich countries what it had done in poor ones — and so it began stripping away everything that made a job “a job.” Because the economy was increasingly composed of monopolies, giant companies, banks, and investors had the power to do so with impunity. Speculators began raiding pension funds. Managers began stripping away benefits of every kind, from childcare, to vacations, to healthcare. Until, at last, in a final triumph, the “at-will job” and the “zero-hours contract” were created — social contracts that were only “jobs” in name, but offered less than no stability, security, mobility, or opportunity. People who didn’t have benefits could now be fired on a whim — and so now they bore all the risk. But the risk of what, precisely?

Remember those speculators? Taking huge risks, betting billions with each other, on exactly nothing of real value? Risk had come full circle. Now it was the average person in the real economy who bore all the risks of these bets going bad. If the bets with south, who’d take the hit? All those people with zero benefits, no protection, no safety, all those people for whom “a job” now meant something more like “a temporary soul-crushing way to avoid destitution.” They’re the ones who’d be fired, instantly, lose what little savings they had, have their already dwindling incomes slashed, be ruined.

And then the bets went bad. As bets tend to do, when you make too many of them, on foolish things. What had the speculators been betting with each other on? As it turns out, largely on property prices. But people without the stable jobs that had kept such a huge property bubble going didn’t have growing incomes anymore. Property prices couldn’t keep rising. Bang! The financial system fell like a row of dominoes. It turned out that everyone had bet property prices would go on rising — and on the other side of that bet was…everyone else. All of them had been betting on the same thing — “we all bet prices will keep rising forever!” The losses were so vast, and so widespread, that the whole global financial system buckled. The banks didn’t have the money to pay each other for these foolish bets — how could they have? Each one had bet the whole house on the same thing, and they all would have gone bankrupt to each other. LOL — do you see the fatal stupidity of it all yet?

So in had to step governments. They bailed out the banks — but didn’t “restructure” them, which is to say, fire their managers, wash out their shareholders, and sell off the bad loans and bets. They just threw money at them — and took those bad bets onto the nation’s books, instead. It was the most foolish decision since the Great Depression. Why?

Well, now governments had trillions in — pow! — sudden debt. What were they to do? How would they pay it off? Now, you might think that Presidents are very intelligent people, but unfortunately, they are just politicians. And so instead of doing what they should have done — printing money, simply cancelling each others’ debts to each other, which were for fictional speculation anyways — they decided that they were “broke”. Bankrupt, even — even though a country can’t go bankrupt, anymore than you could if you could print your own currency at home, and spend it everywhere.

What does a bankrupt have to do? Liquidate. So governments began to slash investment in social systems of all kinds. Healthcare systems, pension systems, insurance systems, media and energy systems. This was the fourth step in the birth of predatory capitalism: austerity.

But people’s incomes were already dwindling, thanks to the first three steps — as jobs not just disappeared in quantity, but also imploded in quality, as monopolies grew in power, and as pointless, destructive, zero-sum speculation sucked the life out of the real economy. The only thing keeping the real economy going at this point was investment by the government — after all, the speculators were speculating, not investing for the long run. It was governments that were effectively keeping economies afloat, by providing a floor for income, by anchoring economies with a vast pool of stable, safe, real, secure jobs, and investinging dollars back in societies short of them. And yet, at the precise moment that governments needed to create more of precisely that, they did just the opposite.

Snap! Economies broke like twigs. The people formerly known as the middle class had been caught in between the pincers of these four forces — financialization, monopoly, the implosion of the job, and austerity. Together, they shattered what was left of rich economies — to the point that today, incomes are stagnant across the rich world, even in much vaunted Scandinavia, while living standards are falling in many rich countries, like the US and UK.

What do people do as hardship begins to bite — especially those who expected comfortable, easy lives? They become reactionary, lashing out violently. They seek safety in the arms of demagogues. That doesn’t mean, as American pundits naively think, that “poor people become authoritarians!” Quite the opposite.

It’s the once prosperous but now imploded middle which turns on the classes, ethnicities, groups, below it. The people who expected and felt entitled to lives of safety and security and stability — who anticipated being at the top of a tidy little hierarchy, the boss of this or that, the chieftain of that or this, but now find themselves adrift and unmoored in a collapsing society, powerless. That gap between expectation and reality is what ruinous. They retain a desperate need to be atop a hierarchy, to be above someone, the entitled imploded middles — and what has happened in history, time and again, is that they turn to those who promise them just that superiority, by turning on those below them. Even if, especially if, it is in the extreme, irrational, yet perfectly logical form of supremacy and dominion over the weak, the despised, and the impure.

And that is what all today’s reactionary, extremist movements — which I call the Faction — really are. Predatory capitalism imploding into strange, new forms of old diseases of the body politic —ultrauthoritarianism, theosupremacism, kleptofascism, neofeudalism, biodominionism, hatriarchy, technotalitarianism, novel and lethal forms of ruin for a new dark age.

And so here we are, you and I. On the cusp of that age. A time where the shadows in human hearts shine as black and blinding as midnight. And once again, it is the folly and hubris of wise men that led us here.

Umair

 July 2018

As the world burns

Vietnam:
As an advisor and liaison I lead native troops but nonetheless was looked upon as the "supreme local power", way too much power for a very young man, just out of adolescence. I used my power as a good soldier at first, fighting who was perceived and inculcated in me as the enemy. . .and if I didn't do it, I had the definite impression that very little would get done. . .However, after nine months I had an epiphany in the form of a chopper pilot asking for permission to engage, "Three military aged males with packs and weapons evading"...rote, scripted, common parlance. For some reason it was too pat, too familiar. I asked for his altitude, to which he replied some distance which would make identification of packs and weapons or gender nigh on to impossible. I suggested he go closer to find the true nature of his target. I didn't hear back from him for an inordinate length of time. So, I keyed the mike and asked if he'd identified his intended target. He responded, "Yes, disregard...it was a mamasan with two baby sans doing their laundry by a river." How many times in the past had I cleared requests to fire? Never again in any time of uncertainty would I be so gullible. I became the meanest bastard in my area of operations...unless there was contact, I generally denied requests for fire. I became very anti-war at that moment...always before it had been a song at camp, an idea...not a mind blast of reality. I was forever changed.

Winter is passing

It has been since autumn that I’ve written anything.  I feel...no, I know that a coup has been stag d in this country. But, from my vantage point it is only a matter of a worsening of an already very bad sc ne. More and more I live my life on the margins, by choice I am an outsider. Some don’t have that luxury.  Being a white man in America is so different than being a POC. Indigenous peoples, who I have always lived near and with, regardless of it was in Arizona or in Minnesota, are the truest outsiders. The connection I feel to our Mother Earth and her creatures, her very being, is so important as I stand at the threshold of my elder years. Not that many years from ashes and dust, I long to step through the veil and regain the majick. My thoughts are fill d with the cries of the forests, the sadness of the winged and four legged. The trophies of man’s ego. From the margins I see more than from the outside, but I long to once again step out. To be a part of her beauty, to be apart from war and the incessant anger and fear.