Eeek! Communists!

Poor Debbie Lesko! Some mean people wanted to keep the Republican congresswoman from Arizona from bringing her gun into the Capitol. She is outraged. We don't know what kind of scene she makes at the airport, but in the Capitol, where she and her colleagues are routinely kettled for the convenience of armed mobs, she's stamping her little feet. "We now live in Pelosi's Communist America!" she tweeted thunderously. Yes, you can tweet thunderously.

Ah, that old chestnut! It brings me back. When I was a kid that's what you called other kids on the playground if you wanted to rile 'em up. They were commies! Specifically, dirty commies. Just like Miss Debbie, we didn't know what we meant by it. It was another word for asshole. 

So Miss Debbie doesn't really mean "Communist" when she complains about being detained at a metal detector. What she's really hopped up about is governmental overreach. Authoritarians are the worst, unless they're Russians or North Koreans or some other repressive, crushing regime that we kind of admire, right, Miss Debbie? Authoritarianism is awesome if God's on your side.

"Communist" is just one of those big-basket words that scoops up many different people indiscriminately. It's a broad brush. It's like calling all Republicans "Nazis," when a lot of them are just self-dealing assholes.

I like to keep an ear open for the language being used to perpetuate the plutocracy. It evolves. For four years now "socialist" has been the slur of choice, but now we're hearing more about communists. Hardly anyone can define the terms, but that's irrelevant. Every now and then you will hear someone elucidate what is so awful about being a socialist, and it usually comes down to "they want to take all your hard-earned money and give it to the lazy people."

Sounds bad! But weirdly, they are fantasizing something entirely different from having all their hard-earned wages, pensions, and benefits taken and given to the indolent rich, which is what has actually happened over the last forty years. Someone should look into that.

In any case, I have a lot of commerce with the motley Left Wing and can report that very few of us consider ourselves socialists. There are a few socialists, and an anarchist/anti-capitalist contingent, but the vast bulk of us would align with Democratic Socialism, which aims to maintain a market system but strip it of its worst excesses and failures. A bit more like Eisenhower's America, in other words, without all the racism and sexism and homophobia and xenophobia and...well, we'd like to polish things up a bit, and try to save the planet in the bargain. It's not really scary at all. Make everyone's lives a little better, without making the billionaires' lives worse. Because above a certain income, you shouldn't be able to notice how rich you are. You can drown your soul in a bathtub of money just as easily as in an ocean of it, after all.

There's a lot not to like about our current economic system, in which profit for some is sacred and the true costs of it are paid by the rest of us. Let's look at the results. Our planet may soon become uninhabitable. Extinctions are accelerating. Our resources have been stripped and turned into cash for the few. Legions of us are impoverished, homeless, sick. Entire populations all over the world are on the move for their very survival.

We would like to not be ruined by medical expenses. We would like to not be ruined by fossil fuel consumption. We would like clean water and a range of basic services. We would like to support small farmers. We would also like maybe some bullet trains, please.

"Communist America!" Poor Miss Debbie doesn't mean anything by it, not really. She's just using it as a phony label to instruct the masses who they're supposed to hate. You fling that word out enough and it fails to mean anything at all--it's just a stain in the brain that will hopefully remind you what Debbie wants you to do in the voting booth.

What she doesn't want you to do is think.

The Spoils

We're Americans. We came, we conquered, we pushed into the endless West by the sweat of our brow and the fire of our rifles, and even though we ran out of endlessness long ago, we still believe we can bootstrap ourselves into our own individual clean water and roads and schools and self-defense, all 320 million of us. 'S long as we don't get sick or nothin'. No socialism for us!

But oh, capitalism. Why do we love it so, and so uncritically? It's the engine of prosperity, that's the dogma--the idea that the means of production are in private hands, that profit accrues to the victors, that everyone comes out better, that we go on growing forever and together. If only there were any evidence that it's true, and not that a whole lot of people are doing the work and a tiny fraction is accumulating the profits, and that it's not possible to grow forever! Something doesn't add up.

Used to be people did for themselves and traded for what they could, and mostly people were on the same level. Maybe not for the last few hundred years, but for a million more before that. And they managed to thrive. What's happening, now that having far more than one needs has been elevated to a virtue?

Ask my friend Julie. Julie Zickefoose is a naturalist, exquisitely educated in the splendor of this, our first and last planet. She is observant enough to behold the whole fabric, to know what will come undone when the threads are pulled. She knows what sustains us. But she has to pay for that intimacy. Because, more than those of us who allow advertising to instruct us what we should crave, she experiences every day the thumping joy of natural abundance, our true wealth. And with it, the freight of sorrow that comes with knowing what we've lost, and have yet to lose.

She's counting her losses now. She's got eighty natural Ohio acres she calls a "sanctuary," because it's the losses all around it that define it. And just down the road, she is watching a wooded wonder come crashing down, tree by tree, and she knows every creature that depends on it, bird to bat to bobcat. She'll be the one who remembers where the newt pond used to be. She is watching a tapestry being degraded to burlap. Because someone was willing to part with it for a dab of cash to put an oil well in there. Soon the birdsong will be crushed under a constant roar, and a flaming stack will steal the dark from the night.

She and many of her neighbors have not signed away their mineral rights, but a patchwork of natural poverty is blooming all around her, scored by a drumbeat of machinery. When the patches overwhelm the original fabric, the threads can't hold it together.

Lord pity the people who have the misfortune of living on top of something like the Marcellus Shale. When coal is to be mined, or copper, or diamonds, or shale oil, everything that stands between capitalism's victors and their money is called "overburden." That would include your forests, your carbon sinks, your newt ponds, your topsoil, your water, your last planet's own means of production. And all of us: we're overburden too. Coal miners are nothing if not expendable, but so is everyone else who counts on the genius of the living world to sustain us, even if we don't know it. We are to be tossed aside as the money is siphoned to the top and we will be left with less than we started with. Much less.



It's not a coincidence that extraction piracy is so often inflicted on indigenous peoples. In some parts of the world, they are sitting on the last unmolested acres, so they must be subdued. In America, the First Nations were allotted the unloved bits, the pieces with no obvious value to the conquerers, and now that it turns out there's black gold in them there barren hills, why, it's time for them to knuckle under again. In North Dakota, the Standing Rock Sioux are holding their ground against the capitalists. The oil comes from elsewhere, but the pipeline is to be routed in a way that threatens their sacred sites and their water. Life, in other words. Lest these concerns seem quaint and primitive, know this: the pipeline route has already been changed to accommodate the needs of the good white people of Bismarck.

Only a false economy considers the profit of a few to be a fair swap for a devastated, discarded landscape and a ruined atmosphere. The balance sheets are off. The costs have been hidden.

The Standing Rock Sioux understand what is sacred on this last planet, and they're standing against its destruction. Who will stand with them?

Bottling Money

Bull Run

There's a company that's advertising its bottled water as "the best stuff on Earth." And it is. People are starting to realize that. There are a whole lot of things that are turning out to be not quite as important as we thought they were, but water is not one of them. People have known that forever. They used to distribute themselves in a reasonable way across the landscape in the olden days. If there was a spot that had water, that's where they parked their fannies. You've got a confluence of rivers, that's where the cities were.

We've got it pretty good around here. We've got a big lake up in the foothills and over a hundred years ago some folks had the bright idea of protecting the entire watershed that feeds it, and not building on it or sticking boats on it or pooping near it or anything, and they ran a big pipe from the lake to Portland. Then they dammed up another area downstream and got themselves a new reservoir and between the two of them we've got enough water to waste, even with a much bigger population. And it's delicious. Even the water that goes down the driveway is delicious.

Original water pipeline

It's pretty low-tech. Nothing but rain and gravity. No one is allowed to set foot in the hills that drain into the lakes. It's a big mass of unobstructed green up there. There are some places along the water pipeline where a few unobtrusive chemicals are added just to take care of random bacteria from elk poop but it's a very simple system. Sensible. This is exactly how people should come together to provide for the common good. Lots of folks think socialism is a dirty word but it's a lot more efficient than giving everyone a bucket and a gun and wishing them the best of luck.

You'd think we could all agree that water is a resource that should be cherished and protected because none of us can live without it, but no. The very fact that it's necessary is a lever that can be used to pry up a bunch of money. So companies are diverting public water into petroleum-based containers with a half-life of forever and marking it up by a factor of thousands and successfully selling it to people who actually have access to the same stuff coming out of their own tap. It's a mystery why they buy it, but they do.

Right here, up the Gorge a ways, they're talking about giving the Nestle Corporation the rights to some of our super-clean water so they can put it in those bottles and make us pay a ransom for it, and they're doing it because it will mean fifty people in the small town of Cascade Locks will get jobs. Shoot, we would all agree to jump in a mass grave if it meant we were fully employed digging the sucker first. It makes no sense to privatize a necessity like water, but we give wealthy people a lot of leeway. We even mistake wealth for virtue. If you've got enough money, you can buy your own vocabulary and teach it to the masses. You're not a leech, you're a job-creator, and even without any evidence, people will believe it.

If you and your friends are rich enough, you can even buy the terms of a new conversation. You can get ordinary working stiffs to believe there is something called a Death Tax, as though you can be taxed when you're dead, and not your pink, entitled heirs, with their smooth hands, who are the feckless recipients of your slab of cash.

You're in control of the lexicon. Nobody even talks about "pirates" anymore.

All Systems Are Go

The family company is cautiously optimistic today as word came that the grandnephew Oliver's shit production start-up, after a very productive two years, has begun preliminary work into transferring at least some operations directly to the potty chair. This expansion of the franchise is deemed feasible via a reduction in middle management, a move that both his parents strongly support. All systems appeared to be "go" and then word of the developments was leaked to the outside. At least something seemed to be leaking. I answered a knock at my door and discovered Ted Cruz and Rand Paul on the front porch. They were frowning.

We heard about your plans. Trust us on this. You do not want to be going in that direction. Not in the Obama economy.

What economy is that? The one in which housing starts have shown solid growth? No. The one in which unemployment is trending down? No. The one that caved in when the housing bubble burst and the financial sector grew at the expense of fairly compensated labor? No. The one in which wage growth has shown stubborn stagnation?

That's the one. And in times like these, the last thing you want to do is embark on any job-killing moves.

No one's killing anything. Oliver's doing a fine job. He's doing it in his pants at the moment, but digestive output is predicted to rise, and everyone in the company thought it would be wise to look into new distribution channels.

Which would result in the loss of jobs. His mother's, at least, and maybe even his father's, in your Democrat families. And diaper manufacturers. And the people who make those little stick-on air fresheners.

His folks are okay with that. They've got jobs. This just cuts down their hours a little. Kind of a quality-of-life issue.

This country was built by workers, not slackers. And frankly, we're concerned that you are so anxious to introduce an innocent child to the spirit-crushing nanny state at such an impressionable age. 

The...?

The Obamaline. The socialist waste management system. This is exactly how Hitler started.

The sewer line? We're fans of the sewer line. Really? Think of it as a pipeline. You love pipelines.

There's a difference between pipelines run with the commercial vigor of private equity and government-run socialist pipelines.

Seriously? Would you want private corporations to be in charge of the sewer system? Shouldn't it be a right to have your poop flushed away to a facility that safeguards the public health?

See, right there, dangerous concepts. Rights and public health. Next you're going to be saying the citizens have a right to water and food. And if the state is expected to be in charge of public health, there is no incentive for citizens to take care of themselves.

Well. I don't know. We're talking cholera and stsuff. Besides, you physically can't have competing networks of sewers running underground. There would be no competition among firms. A private, profit-motivated firm would be able to charge anything they wanted to make the shit go away.

You say "profit" as though it were a bad thing. Ma'am, that is the lifeblood of a strong economy. You're making our own case here.

I don't know. It can't be all socialist when Oliver is in charge of the means of production. And a lot of what Oliver has been producing was already being sent to the socialist sewer line anyway. This way we're only down-sizing the part that ended up in the landfill.

The landfill his parents have helped build, might we remind you, and that's no small thing. Listen. If we are to nurture strong citizens, we should not expect government to take care of everything. It fosters dependency. Everyone should take control of his own poop, and try to get it to roll downhill.

But someone always lives downhill.

And that's what's going to motivate them to better themselves. They never will if the state always steps in to prevent the shit from doing what it does naturally. And don't forget: all this shit is being made right here in the U S of A. And you were always complaining about outsourcing.

[pause for momentary flush of patriotic fervor]

And besides, in the case of something like cholera, the last thing you want to do is have a centralized system run by government bureaucrats. One in which any fecal contamination can be traced to an individual source, triggering the kind of invasive home inspections that are mandated under Obamacare.

What? That's not true.

Depends on how you define true. Anything gets true with enough repetition. Did you know that the amount of poop in the Obamaline is already subject to mandatory review by his Depth Panels? The whole socialist arrangement stinks. Every time you take a dump, you're thinking it's someone else that's going to make sure we don't get cholera. Always "someone else." Well, guess what? "Someone else" is you and me, sister, the taxpaying public.

I'm actually fine with...

We need to create an ownership society. And we can't do it if we keep expecting government to help us out. No. We must assume responsibility for our own poop. We can contract out for its removal by the private company of our choice, or just let the chips fall where they may, but in a free country we must not allow our shit choices to be compelled by the state.

I don't know. An awful lot of shit would pile up. Seems to me it's got to be dispersed somehow.

Leave that to us.