Why leftists live longer -- Final End

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Date Posted: 12:57:19 05/26/02 Sun
Author: Drummond
Subject: Why leftists live longer

From www.counterpunch.com

Diary of a Northwest Trip

Why Reds Live Longer

You Can Thank the Left for
Bread, Coffee and Beer!

Muzzle Those Pigs! Shoot Those Pigeons!

by Alexander Cockburn

I toured the Pacific Northwest last week, doing fundraisers for the Greens in Spokane and Seattle, and addressing forward-lookers in the City Club in Eugene, mustered by poliitically ambitiois Don Kahle of Comix-News. Last time I was in Eugene and Spokane was in the late 1980s, doing fundraisers for groups battling US intervention in Central America.

There were familiar faces, long lost friends, like Morton and Paige in Spokane whom I hadn't seen in years, or Marianne Torres, also in Spokane but in an earlier incarnation trying to get Berkeley voted a sister sister to a Palestinian refugee camp, or Lucia and the gang in Eugene with whom I partied to the strains of Curtis Delgado and the Stilettoes after the fundraiser for their anti intervention group. The left in America might move on, but mostly it never goes away.

Until quite recently I'd look out into audiences and see 70-year and 80-year old Commies organizing for good causes, alive and kicking decades after the FBI agents and congressional investigators who persecuted them in the 1950s had keeled over from coronaries, lung cancer and kindred summonses by the Reaper. A few years ago when Sender Garlin died in Boulder at the age of 97, I described him as America's senior radical. When the dust settled, it turned out that the (still frisky) Most Senior was an emeritus prof at MIT aged 106. He'd been accused of trying to overthrow the Commonwealth of Massachusetts back in the 1940s, then as now a very sound ambition.

The theory I shared with audiences in Spokane and Seattle was that Commies lived long because they walked a lot in earlier years, selling the Worker. In England there was the Rambler Club tradition, where reds strode across hill and dale on weekends, asserting ancient rights of way, and knocking aside the newly stretched wire and gates of Enclosers trying to keep the rabble out. My friend Joe Paff points out that orchestral conductors live long too because they get plenty of exercise in the upper body. Conductors have their Beethoven scores and Commies had Roberts Rules, sitting far into the night, waiting to refer the motion back to the rules committee before trudging healthfully home. Reds stay interested. In other other words they stay Alive.

I always try to sell the left on optimism, because of the left's innate tendency to think everything's for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds. The day I spoke in Seattle was independence day for East Timor. As I told a celebration party put on by East Timor Action Network, Who would have bet in 1976 that after ghastly suffering and tremendous heroism, East Timor would, in 2002, be hoisting its flag?

At the ETAN party I met Joe Szwaja, who'd run as a green against the very ccomplacent Rep McDermott, challenging him on trade, salmon (the Columbia river), Colombia and Iraq. Joe got an incredible 25 per cent or so of the vote and scared McDermott into better behavior. So much for the accusation that Greens never do anything but help elect Republicans. Joe, once on a reform slate that changed the face of the city council in Madison, Wisconsin, is an impressive fellow. If the Greens can marshal people like him to run in local and state races, they'll go far.

At that ETAN party Joe introduced me too two Colombians, touring the country to alert people to the awful depredations of Exxon, mining for coal in the northern part of the country. They told me that ancestral Indian lands have been ravaged, agriculture devastated and villages wrecked. Now Exxon has sold out to a European consortium that includes Anglo American. But for the indigenous people Exxon is not out of the game and must pony up for compensation. The Colombians were heading for the Exxon shareholders meeting in Dallas to raise a stink. Check out the Pressure Point Web Site at http://www.pressure point.org.

Pressure Point is the group that brought the Wayuu activist Remedios from Colombia and is doing a lot to network with people in the struggle for environmental and climate justice worldwide, a welcome change from a lot of the mainstream environmental groups who are doing little to confront corporate power.

Optimism of the will, optimism of the intelligence. I reminded the Spokane Greens of some of the less trumpeted legacies of the Sixties. Better food. The visionary radical hippies had a lot to do with that, touting organic food and the grains that now find their way into the health pages of the Sunday papers. Good coffee was promoted by radicals like my friends and neighbors the Paffs, who began by roasting beans on their kitchen stove for friends and neighbors and because the local town sold only Folgers, and who now run Humboldt's very successful Goldrush Coffee (call 707-629-3460 for mail orders. Right now Joe says the Dark Sumatra is terrific.) Beer too. The backlot brewers who began Sierra Nevada beer in Chico, who ultimately beat back Budweiser's efforts to destroy them and thus sealed the victory of the microbrews, came out of the Sixties alternative culture.

Bread, coffee and beer. It's up there with the Bolsheviks' old slogan of Peace, Land and Bread. When I got back home I got this email from Natalie, a woman who was at that Spokane event and who told me that in an earlier incarnation she'd lived on a hippie commune in Loleta, which is just south of Eureka and some 50 miles from where I live in Humboldt county, northern California.

"Alexander, (This is from the person you met in Spokane who lived on the commune in Loleta) I've been thinking about the comments you made about the things that HAVE changed over the years--you mentioned that organic food has gotten bigger, coffee is better, beer is better, that the Living Wage movement has gained momentum, etc. Your point being that people have made a difference and things have changed for the better due to people having vision and holding fast.

" A few things struck me about your comments. One was (and this relates to my Humboldt County years) that birth practices are another thing that have changed incredibly over the past 20 years. When I lived in Eureka, I attended the People's School of Medicine in Arcata, which was a long -haired, long--skirted bunch of hippie girls (and a few guys) who were learning to be lay midwives. We all had our babies at home and helped one another deliver. It's so accepted now that men can be in the delivery room, women can labor without being restrained, etc, that I think people forget that these things were absolutely not the standard back then. You had to deliver at home in order to avoid relinquishing power and being subjected to established practices.

"On the other hand...as much as these changes have been important--the better food, better birth--it also strikes me that they have been changes that affect, for the most part, those of us who who have been given the opportunities that lead to making a decent living. We are eating better, exercising more, living more vital lives at older ages but the poor are more obese, eating more unhealthy, and suffering from debilitating and sometimes fatal diseases at higher rates. We are having healthier babies and enjoying more choice but poor people and more uninformed people are having more C-sections and unnecessary procedures. Not to mention those who are still forced to relax with a can of Bud Lite and wake up to Folgers. Hey, I read in the paper yesterday that outdated Coke is repackaged and sent to stores in poor areas of town--not going to kill them but it's flatter and has less taste and adds to an overall diminished enjoyment of life. My point being that, yes, changes have happened, but they are still largely beneficial to people with money and education. So what's different? Nothing profound here but felt like passing my thoughts on. I work with homeless women and children and I'm constantly reminded of how their third-class status keeps them isolated from so many things that we take for granted. Natalie."

Well, Natalie, you have a point, but lifestyles and preferences trickle sideways and down and you can't order people at gunpoint not to eat crap. Working people order Sierra Nevada, drive through the Paffs' espresso stands, look for good food. C-sections aren't always a bad thing either. Joe Paff tells me that when he grew up in the late Thirties in a steel town on the edge of Pittsburgh, "as long as my father was unemployed and we were dirt poor, we ate very well. My father made his own beer. My mother baked bread and canned her stewed tomatoes, and my brothers brought home rabbit, pheasant and other game. As soon as my brothers and my father got jobs in the booming steel mills we were now well off. My father had a new car. We ate Wonder Bread, store canned tomatoes and my father drank Iron City Beer.

Moral: the victory of these debauched foods was the product of American prosperity and tv advertising that made my mother and father think that's what they ought to eat to emulate the middle class they saw on tv shows. My mother finally denied having actually baked bread."

A Parable of Propane and Creative Liberty

There's a wonderful phrase I came across the other day in the intro to Peter Brown's The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. He quotes the historian Arnaldo Momigliano as saying of the great Russian scholar of the ancient world Michael Rostovtzeff, "Those who have known him have known greatness. They will always cherish the memory of a courageous and honest historian for whom civilization meant creative liberty."

Creative liberty! That's our basic goal, as I said in my talks in Eugene, Spokane and Seattle. Too often the left is seen as a kind of Nanny, howling for tighter regulation, allowing the right to steal the idea of freedom. Go back to the Enlightenment and you find the notion of creative liberty bursting from the pages of people like Rousseau or Voltaire. Anarchists march under the same banner. I think the real trouble came with the Fabians and the Progressives at the turn of the century who turned the dream of creative liberty into a series of regulatory orders on how people should conduct their lives, right down to the simplest task, a kind of Robert's Rules of Order for more or less everything. Creative liberty went out the window.

And when I say "simplest task" I mean it. How about connecting a propane bottle to a gas barbecue. Here's a parable of propane.

In California and other states across this great nation we have been confronting deadlines on new propane bottle valves. I speak of the mostly 5-gallon propane gas bottles to be seen in trailer parks, on RVs, Webber bbqs, boats, back porches, street kitchens. You name it, and there's probably a 5-gallon propane bottle somewhere around. I recently came across a vivid illustration of the passions aroused by this crisis in Butte County, in the Chico area of Northern California. The local propane distributor told my host Jeff Howell that he'd been physically attacked twice in the past four weeks by angered denizens of trailer parks.

Why was he attacked?

The answer can be traced to the run-up in propane gas prices in recent years which has prompted more and more small stores like 7/11s to sell propane. The inexperienced propane dispenser simply fills the bottle till clouds of propane inform the dispenser that it's time to stop. The overfilled propane bottle is taken to the back porch where perhaps it sits in the sun and warms up until gas passes through the escape valve, ready for possible accidental ignition by someone lighting a cigarette.

Somewhere in this great nation a propane gas valve maker smelled the heady fragrance of opportunity and prompted his lobbyist to action. Regulations duly decreed that all 5 and 7 gallon propane bottles be refitted by April 1 of this year with new valves with (a) an internal float to prevent overfilling and (b) a new wide track thread to enable a trouble free fitting to the propane bottle of the gas hose leading to the relevant appliance.

Counties in California are dealing with this in varied ways. Here in Humboldt county you can turn in your old bottle at various sites and in exchange for around $24 get a new 5 gallon bottle filled with propane. Not a bad deal. In Butte county the original plan had been to have people turn in their bottles to the propane dealer who had set up a mighty vise to hold the bottle while some low paid toiler drained out the propane, and used spark free brass equipment to take out the old valve and put in the new one.

Cost of operation, around $28. Wal-Mart is now selling $5 gallon propane bottles in Butte County for $23.95. The propane dealer will only accept the old bottles for a fee of $6. The scrap metal recycler won't crush the bottles because they might contain propane and would explode in the crusher. There's a growing mountain of old propane bottles in a lot on the edge of Chico, all slowly leaking propane. There's also a growing tendency of people in trailer parks and similar venues to dump their useless propane bottles in the canyon or ditch, sometimes after assaulting the propane distributor for refusing to fill the old and now illegal bottles.

The summer will bring fresh excitement to Lake Tahoe when boat owners toss their useless old propane bottles, some of thm with a gallon or two of propane in them, over the side, thus creating depth charges ready to detonate when the next water ski boat scythes into them at 50 knots. There's no evidence that anyone has been killed by gas leaking from an overfilled propane bottle, excluding the random fatalities suffered by the sort of people who use lawn mowers to trim their hedges.

There's probably a greater risk of being bitten to death by pigs. Muzzle those pigs!

Parable Number Two: That Certain Tingle

My friend Pierre Sprey called up from Maryland and I told him the propane bottle saga. We derided the Nanny State. Pierre designed the F-16 and the A-10. These days he runs Mapleshade Studios, and concerns himself these days with high-end sound. He keeps an eye on new equipment and is thus in a position to inform me of the latest European Community regulations from Brussels as applied to amplifiers.

Now, anyone who has ever assembled a sound system will know that there is a moment when you have to attack the speaker wires to the back of the amplifier, usually by wrapping the bare end of the wire around a nut on the back of the amplifier and tightening down a plastic covered screw.

In their wisdom the safety experts of the EU have decided that amplifiers represent a deadly threat, and that Europeans stand at risk of electrocuting themselves while connecting up their speakers to the amplifier. The facts? Pierre tells me that the back of a large amplifier could put out 40 or 50 volts and if you disconnect the speakers, switch on the amplifier, turn the volume to maximum and grip both posts you might feel a tingle at that level. Maybe Jim Morrison tried it before turning to the certainty of a heroin overdose.

In order to achieve security for all Europeans the Euro-bureaucrats have mandated that all amplifiers have to have a big plastic surround covering the base of the binding post, and a big plastic nut that fits down into the cup, thus ensuring that prying fingers can never touch bare brass of binding post. Out the window go simple spade connectors.

Safety carries a price of course. In this instance the price includes impaired sound because of the plastic around the post and wire. Pierre explains that plastic causes dielectric absorption, soaking up energy from the field around the wire. This takes excitement out of music because it compresses peaks. It also re-releases music with a little delay, so the sound is blurred.

No evidence that Europeans have been dying of tingling post syndrome. The risk of being attacked by rabid pigeons is far greater. Death to pigeons!

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Replies:

I love to feel protected -- schwabra, 20:39:45 05/26/02 Sun
- Awww... -- Lona, 01:25:52 05/27/02 Mon