June 30, 2008 by Jay Taber.

The World Archeological Congress will meet soon in Dublin, where, among other topics, they’ll examine the Tara controversy. Tara Hill, to the Irish, is like The Black Hills to the Lakota and Cheyenne — a sacred landscape imbued with spiritual values, myth and legend.

As a national monument, as well as proposed UNESCO World Heritage Site, Tara defenders are fighting the government of Ireland to protect it from a planned motorway.

As pointed out by Professor Ronayne from Galway University, the privatization of archaeology in service to global development corporations and militaries ensures that such foundational aspects of human identity as cultural heritage will be increasingly under attack. In the absence of the sacred, of course, we will no longer be fully human; maybe that’s the whole idea.

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June 28, 2008 by Jay Taber.

One of my colleague’s students asked if I found my indigenous associates to have a different philosophical perspective. I responded by noting that their cosmology and epistemology was in sharp contrast with dominant society views, and mentioned an interview with Richard Atleo they might find helpful.

Making a connection with philosophies indigenous to the landscape we inhabit could be exciting to students and others feeling adrift in the modern world. Looking at methods of curating social knowledge over long time frames gives one a sense of adaptation and evolution of such things as morality — processes that apply to the European diaspora as well as Native Americans.

This is perhaps a way of introducing non-indigenous Americans to researching sacred dimensions of their own ancient cultures that have much in common with American Indians. I am often amused that Euro-Americans often adopt Asian philosophies, when they can discover philosophies more appropriate to who and where they are by simply looking around.

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June 26, 2008 by Jay Taber.

In his novel The Lazarus Project, Aleksandar Hemon observes it is a short distance from the editorial to the massacre. Referring to America’s anti-immigrant fervor of a century ago, Hemon remarked, “I do not need to tell you what a crowd of excited Christians is capable of doing”.

In the reality of the present, with the benefit of hindsight into the 9/11 hysteria that left a dozen brown-skinned American citizens dead for being different, the ongoing xenophobic behavior by corporate media makes it difficult to think of the human rights abuses at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Fallujah as accidents. Indeed, the overt White Nationalism promoted on FOX News is yet another red flag that things have gotten seriously out of hand.

I’m not sure what the National Council of Churches is waiting for, but a boycott of FOX and their sponsors is long overdue. If our moral authorities won’t act, who will?

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June 25, 2008 by Mirjam Hirch.

“We have no private life,” the secretaries of a German law firm state. Getting up at 6 o’clock in the morning to commute to work, unable to pay the rent in the metropolis. The secretaries usually won’t be back home before late evening after a day full of work. Then they are too tired to get anything more done.

This is the reality of people living in a super rich country, Germany. What kind of life is it? Working in a formal atmosphere of hierarchy and control where employees who were not fortunate enough to attain higher education get per week what their bosses make per hour. This system allows the latter to be admired because of being able to afford fancy toys in the form of sports cars and own nice homes in exclusive areas. At the same time though their screaming bodies are not the most aesthetic to look at. Some move like broomsticks covered with mountains of meat, dressed to the nines.

Unable to hit the stop button, caught in the zero sum game of life’s hedonistic treadmill, finally the body tries out the emergency exit. Making neglect heard in the form of e.g. a heart attack.
Those stories of “Happiness in the Face of Materialism?” tend to be rather short. One can quickly read them in the persons’ wrinkles, which are either not yet showing or decidedly not from laughing and joy.

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June 24, 2008 by Jay Taber.

The totems of Kwakiutl and other aboriginal coastal villages of British Columbia were often the initial cultural expressions encountered by other First Nations and explorers traveling the Inside Passage between the Salish Sea and Queen Charlotte Sound. Facing the setting sun, these carved accounts of history and clan were the ultimate fusion of art and craft, myth and legend.

In Looking at Totem Poles, Hilary Stewart recounts the history of this vital aspect of the indigenous civilization spanning some thousand miles of still dramatic coastline, including many illustrations and stories about how this culture was clandestinely preserved and adapted to the hostile environment of European invasion. The book is informative as well as inspiring in many ways.

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June 21, 2008 by Jay Taber.

(Reading A New Dark Age by our colleague Phil Williams yesterday, I was reminded of our efforts in September 2001 to combat media-generated post-9/11 trauma. As man-made crises become compounded in our everyday lives, critical incident stress can easily trigger widespread panic. Countering the consequences of this irresponsible conduct by media and government propagandists then becomes the arena for what is called convergent responders—ordinary people dealing with extraordinary circumstances. In September 2002, Public Good Project’s Paul de Armond sent the following letter on the topic to the editor of Scientific American.)

“Combatting the Terror of Terrorism” (Scientific American, August 2002) proposes a highly medicalized clinical model for dealing with the informational pathology of terrorism. Public health approaches seek to prevent trauma, minimize risk, and reduce harm. Public health regards well-being as a public good that cannot be selectively dispensed and must be provided universally. Clinical approaches, on the other hand, make prevention an individual - as opposed to a public - responsibility and the treatment of illness an economic activity.

Some public health approaches to terrorism might include community-based education on the causes and prevention of information-based trauma, training national and local media to stop treating terrorist assaults as a form of sensational entertainment and putting in place public service announcements about how people can reduce the harm from Critical Incident Stress (CIS) to be broadcast immediately as these incidents unfold. None of these things will be done as long as mass-casualty terrorism is viewed as a medical, rather than a public health problem.

A public health approach would look to eliminate terrorism entirely, while a medical approach would seek only to treat its effects. Terrorism is a criminal act that - like the crimes of genocide, torture, biological weapons production, slavery or mass rape as a tactic of war - is impermissible anywhere in global civil society. As long as terrorism is considered an extension of statecraft and warfare, it will continue to be a preventable evil that we could stop but instead choose to continue.

(Jay Taber — recipient of the Defender of Democracy award — is an author, columnist, and research analyst at Public Good Project.)

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June 21, 2008 by Jay Taber.

In a recent exchange, the notion of an American popular uprising was broached, conditioned on some future government having gone too far. My response was that this is not in our nature, culturally speaking, but that random violence toward scapegoats is. My suggestion was that prophylactic measures be initiated at community levels in anticipation of public panics generated by ongoing social and political neglect.

Three books come to mind that might help put our present circumstances in context: Peddlers of Crisis by Jerry Sanders, The Science of Coercion by Christopher Simpson, and The Iran-Contra Scandal by Peter Kornbluh.

Sanders illustrates how the National Security Agency (enacted in 1948) enabled secret, unaccountable government that helped to create our current crises; Simpson shows how the methodology of advertising merged with that of psychological warfare to maintain this anti-democratic development; and Kornbluh documents the consequences in the form of the criminalization of US policy and administration under President Reagan. Taken as a whole, these three books help to create a backdrop for the prognosis delineated in A New Dark Age by Phil Williams.

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June 20, 2008 by Jay Taber.

“The problem is that the stateocentric mode of thinking is so highly normative that consideration of alternative forms of governance, which does more than treat them as threats, is typically regarded as heretical, irrelevant, or misguided. Yet if we fail to see the decline of the state and to recognize the underlying realities, the prospect of a cascade of strategic surprises and a series of strategic disasters is inescapable.”

—Phil Williams, From the New Middle Ages to a New Dark Age

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June 20, 2008 by Jay Taber.

Richard Atleo, in his book Tsawalk, writes about civilizations completing phases of growth, and likens the resistance to change or transformation to the reluctance of individuals to leave the comfort zones of womb, home, and immediate family as they mature and encounter institutions and ideas outside their infantile experience.

He specifically denotes the exhausted model of the colonial enterprise, and remarks on how it has changed the natural environment and the spiritual capacity of both indigenous and colonial peoples.

The need to make a spiritual connection in order to advance has him concerned that great harm might take place as we struggle to get unstuck from this unworkable arrangement of relationships. Given the degree of dysfunction and disharmony we live in, I suppose it is inevitable that individual sacrifices will have to be made.

(Professor Atleo, an associate scholar of CWIS, is the first aboriginal to earn a doctorate in British Columbia.)

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June 18, 2008 by Jay Taber.

Taoiseach Cowen says Ireland faces uncertainty due to its rejection of corporate colonialism; earlier in the week, Ireland’s prime minister remarked that he couldn’t get his mind around this mentality. What an odd statement from the leader of Britain’s first and longest held colony — a country of fiercely independent people.

Still, I believe Cowen probably can’t imagine living in defiance of neoliberal aggression; that would require a mind liberated from free-market indoctrination — not something likely to be encountered in mainstream politicians. Which is why, no doubt, the Irish constitution does not rely on representative democracy to protect the Irish nation from foreign rule.

Better the uncertainty of democracy than the certainty of tyranny.

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