GW-Battleground 2006 Poll Reveals Negative Environment for President Bush

and Congressional Republicans and Potential Opportunities for Democrats in 2006

This is a press release, so I think it's okay to quote in its entirety (I saw someone say that in a post about another press release in GD yesterday):





I posted this in GD earlier, but so far there's no interest in this new poll. I think it's good news for Democrats.

if our politicians take advantage of the opportunity. I notice that 68% of those polled favor paying for hurricane reconstruction by raising taxes on households with incomes over 200k. Our dem leaders should be speaking out at every chance, giving positive ideas for turning the country around.

Getting out of Iraq should be the number one priority, in my opinion, because it has already done so much damage in terms of human suffering, much less economic devastation. We have a chance in 2006, it's up to us to make it work.

than smears and attacks. They should attack and smear with the truth. "You know, fellow Americans, I voted to give the President power to use force if necessary in Iraq. We now know it was not necessary, Iraq posed no threat to us, and this administration lied to all of us. It lied to you and it lied to me and my fellow Congress members. I regret that the President USED MY VOTE to unnecessarily invade Iraq and used it to deceive the American people into believing that most of the Congress would have voted the same way had they had the truth at the time.

I am calling for the President to begin to pledge to the Iraqi PEOPLE--not the leadership puppets that we have put in place--that the US will halt all building of military bases on Iraqi soil and that the US will beging to draw down US forces in Iraq beginning January 2006 and will be out of Iraq by December of 2006."

Once they know we won't be around to fight off the insurgents they may do a better job of fighting them themselves.

You can be dealt a great hand and still lose badly by overplaying it.

Of course, you can lose badly by underplaying it.

What a chess game.

What mixed up metaphors!

and still lose because your opponent owns the voting machines.

I heard that expression before, but never before has it taken on such added scope and dimension. Thanks for pointing that out.

"Voters are very dissatisfied with the direction of the country as 66% believe the country is on the wrong track and 28% believe the country is headed in the right direction."


Why is there such a disconnect between the results of this poll, the connection to the party in power, and the realization that there is an alternative?

They are upset with Bush, Iraq, his spending spree, gasoline prices, ect...

But these people could never bring themselves to vote or identify with Democrats.

fix the election....again.

:headbang:

the electorate remains -- is the fact that 73 percent support funding hurricane recovery by "removing items not directly related to road construction from the highway funding bill": in other words, by completely de-subsidizing mass transit -- removing the $52.35 billion so allocated (NOT for transit expansion -- the bill allocates NO money for that purpose -- but merely for operational maintenance of existing systems). The ugly bottom line is that despite the hardships inflicted by skyrocketing fuel prices, 73 percent of all American voters want public transportation abolished.

Moreover this is by far the largest policy-majority the study uncovered.

The fact such a huge and overwhelming 73 percent advocate this solution -- an expression of total hostility toward mass transport -- reveals a dread truth about the American public. It tells us the vast majority of Americans are still impossibly caught up in their identify-with-the-oppressor, one-occupant-per-vehicle, ruin-the-environment, damn-the-poor, obscenely smug reactionary selfishness and greed. In fact they are so faithful to the reactionary mindset (and the racism that breeds it, for which see the Paul Krugman link below), it is now obvious nothing short of a miracle will convince Americans to embrace genuinely progressive candidates or progressive causes: no wonder so many Democrats remain silent.

Here on the subject of the relationship between U.S. racism and the nation's worst-in-the-industrial-world social services (which include health and transportation) is the most important essay written by an American since the Civil War:

http://www.pkarchive.org/column/091905.html

And yes, study after study has found that support for public transport -- especially rapid transit -- is indeed a bellwether cause: those who support it are overwhelmingly genuine progressives, those who oppose it are true reactionaries and usually racists to boot. Hence, by the above measurement, 73 percent of American voters are true reactionaries.

73 percent support funding hurricane recovery by "removing items not directly related to road construction from the highway funding bill": in other words, by completely de-subsidizing mass transit

But the survey question did not mention mass transit, because they knew
that if they did, they would not get the answers they wanted. Calling
it a "highway funding bill" further loaded the question.

If the question was "Do you support shutting down all mass transit?"
(which is what removing those subidies would do) you would not get
anywhere near 73% support.

in this country is nevertheless huge and venomous -- something I know from my years in journalism, which include five years as a transportation reporter and another couple of years as an editor on a major transport journal. The only place a solid majority of the public enthusiastically supports mass transit is New York City and the metropolitan Northeast; even in allegedly enlightened places like San Francisco or Seattle, public transport remains an exceptionally hard sell -- all the more so because most of the politicians are happily whoring for Big Oil and Big Automotive.

The last (Environmental Protection Agency?) mass-transit-support study I saw -- this maybe five years ago -- projected it would take fuel prices above $3 per gallon to bring about any substantial change in public-transport ridership numbers, and that even then the change would be deeply begrudging, with preference holding solidly to the (single-occupant) automobile. Sadly, data on this topic is extremely hard to find on the Internet; Googling "public support for mass transportation" yields no entries at all, while "mass transportation" yields an impossible-to-sort 546,000 entries. That there are no entries at all under the "public support" category tells its own sad tale of popular indifference and hostility. In fact the only recent material I've seen on this topic has all been printed work available mostly in libraries -- often reports I've run across while researching other social issues.

It is my own conviction a strong desperation factor is at work in the increasingly sullen stubbornness with which Americans cling to their environment-killing motorcars. The automobile is America's last remaining stronghold of individual privacy -- our privacy has been violated to nonexistence everywhere else -- and the individual motorist locked in frantic daily life-and-death struggle against all odds and everyone else is in fact the final embodiment, reductio ad absurdum, of the American myth of the rugged individualist: pioneer, cowboy, robber-baron, gangster, conqueror etc. Thus to discourage our dependence on the automobile (and encourage support for public transport), the ethos of rugged individualism itself must be challenged and nullified -- something our corporate overlords will never allow (witness what was done to suppress the Counterculture). As I said, this is my own opinion -- but it is one I believe is solidly supported by all the known facts and psychological probabilities.

Hence I stand on my analysis of the significance of the 73 percent. In other words, even if the question had specified the abolition of public transport, 73 percent (or even more) would have supported it if the hypothetical trade-off was better highways -- this in keeping with the approximately 27-28 percent who take the opposite stance, enthusiastically supporting mass transit. Moreover the significance of the 73 percent is confirmed by other studies: on this cornerstone issue, America truly is hopelessly reactionary -- all the more savagely so now that the economic realities of capitalism are becoming more undeniably horrific.

Technically you are correct, but opposition to mass transport in this country is nevertheless huge and venomous...

I questioned the validity of one survey question, but I agree that
there is a lot of opposition to mass transit. The oil and car lobby
has framed transit as being a poverty program, thus selling the meme
that anybody who can possibly afford a car should own one, and that
transit is meant only for the desperately poor.

Transit is successful when it positions itself as a better way for
everyone to get around, and is actually able to deliver on that
promise. Obviously, that means spending more money on it, not less.

The only place a solid majority of the public enthusiastically supports mass transit is New York City and the metropolitan Northeast;

It helps that those cities actually have usable public transportation.

even in allegedly enlightened places like San Francisco or Seattle, public transport remains an exceptionally hard sell

Somebody must be doing some hard selling then, because they keep expanding BART. Ridership is up too. People will use a clean,
well-run rail system with reasonably frequent service.

The last (Environmental Protection Agency?) mass-transit-support study I saw -- this maybe five years ago -- projected it would take fuel prices above $3 per gallon to bring about any substantial change in public-transport ridership numbers, and that even then the change would be deeply begrudging, with preference holding solidly to the (single-occupant) automobile....

Gas prices out here hit $3 per gallon, and there has been a jump in ridership on the transit systems. They have come back down a bit, but
the transit systems are still seeing the increased ridership.

It is my own conviction a strong desperation factor is at work in the increasingly sullen stubbornness with which Americans cling to their environment-killing motorcars. The automobile is America's last remaining stronghold of individual privacy -- our privacy has been violated to nonexistence everywhere else

A need for privacy is a big reason so many of us prefer detached homes.
Cars are merely a means of getting there -- often the only means available.


and the individual motorist locked in frantic daily life-and-death struggle

not since I moved out of the Boston area, the drivers are much more mellow out here ;-)

against all odds and everyone else is in fact the final embodiment, reductio ad absurdum, of the American myth of the rugged individualist: pioneer, cowboy, robber-baron, gangster, conqueror etc. Thus to discourage our dependence on the automobile (and encourage support for public transport), the ethos of rugged individualism itself must be challenged and nullified -- something our corporate overlords will never allow

It is something our genetics will never allow. For generations,
people have been coming to America because they needed more space --
more freedom, more privacy, more space. You can challenge that, but
you cannot nullify it. Better to work with it. Rugged individualists
hate getting stuck in traffic. Really rugged individualists would rather ride a bicycle than get stuck in traffic (and perhaps take
the bike on the train, especially to get across the Bay).

(witness what was done to suppress the Counterculture).

and continues to be done. If you try to dance in Utah, they call in the SWAT team. The counterculture was/is suppresed because of its
individualism.

(1)-Somebody must be doing some hard selling then, because they keep expanding BART.

There have been bitter political fights over the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (including the fact BART is a major target in the Bush Administration's ongoing effort to un-fund ALL mass transport), and back in the '70s and '80s (when I was covering transportation on a regular basis) it's initial construction was so methodically sabotaged by the political establishment, it nearly didn't happen. Seems to me the Schwarzenegger Administration tried to shaft BART just a year or two ago, too.

But don't blame just the Republicans: the only difference between Democrats and Republicans on this issue is while the latter despise mass transit, the former merely hate it. Both parties whore for Big Oil and Big Automotive.

BART is expanding only because San Francisco's city fathers/mothers got in on the UMTA money -- now long gone -- while it was still available; today's expansion projects were funded years ago, possibly even decades ago. (UMTA = federal Urban Mass Transit Authority.)

(2)-Ridership is up too. People will use a clean,well-run rail system with reasonably frequent service.

The issue is not whether public transport ridership is up -- right now it is way up all across the nation -- but whether it STAYS up, and in this the availability of rapid transit (which by definition runs on rails and is powered by electricity) is pivotal.

Bus systems are uncomfortable and impossibly slow: yesterday I spent an utterly exhausting seven hours on buses making a necessary trip to another city and back that by automobile would have taken me no more than three hours total. A well-managed rail system -- for example NYC's Metro North or PATH (Port Authority Trans Hudson aka "the Hudson Tubes") -- would have made this trip in maybe an hour and a half: no more than 45 minutes each way.

The construction of rail systems -- electric powered high-speed rail systems -- are thus the keystone of any campaign to build public transport ridership. The politicians and their owners know this, which is why rail systems are (A) always controversial anywhere save in the Northeast and (B) are always fought tooth-and-claw. Note in this context how Seattle's light rail system -- due entirely to (ongoing) political sabotage (including a calculated effort to agitate racist hostilities against the system by turning transit bonds into a welfare program for minorities) -- is already nine years behind schedule without so much as a mile of track laid down.

In truth the system will probably never be completed, allowing our treacherous politicians to continue to betray us and thereby collect their secret subsidies from the Oil Barons and the Car Lords. Thus the Puget Sound area remains stuck with its herky-jerky bus system and all its attendant discouragements: an absolute guarantee the people will return to their automobiles as soon as they can afford to.

The tactical and strategic importance of these facts -- especially the deliberate role of the intrinsically negative qualities of bus systems in discouraging mass transit use -- cannot be overstressed.

(3)-...the drivers are much more mellow out here.

Not from what I've seen. The worst, most defiant, most dangerously unpredictable drivers I've ever seen anywhere (including New York City, New Jersey, Washington D.C. and South Korea) are in the Seattle/Tacoma area. Tacoma has one of the worst frequencies of drunken driving in America, and in the past year, I have witnessed more motorists running red lights in Tacoma than I have observed in a lifetime everywhere else. But the whole Puget Sound area is nearly as bad: turning signals are habitually unused, and the violently self-centered cell-phone talkers will literally kill you. The most defiantly slow drivers are here too: they get on Interstate 5, drive 45 miles per hour and cackle gleefully at the consequences. All this amidst what is variously rated as the second or third worst traffic congestion in the United States: in fact I believe the phrase "rode rage" was coined about seven years ago by a script writer for a Seattle television news show.

*****

Our one big disagreement -- and that may be only a matter of semantics too -- is over the Counterculture. You wrote: "The counterculture was/is suppressed because of its individualism."

Au contrarie: it wasn't the Counterculture's individuality the oligarchy opposed; in fact a big part of the mechanism of the Counterculture's downfall was its conformity -- especially its anti-intellectuality -- all of which it inherited from its parent culture.

What the oligarchy feared and opposed -- to the extent the CIA itself was unleashed on a massive anti-Counterculture operation (Operation CHAOS) -- was what Countercultural journalist Walter Bowart in 1966 named "the Revolution in Consciousness": the radical change in mindset that gave birth to the feminist renaissance, environmentalism, eco-feminism, eco-socialism and -- in the spiritual realm -- to the resurrection of humanity's oldest deity: the Mother Goddess.

Today, whether we regard the goddess as metaphor or metaphysical reality, it is especially important we understand the spiritual dimension of the Counterculture precisely because -- without that piece of the puzzle -- the motive behind the rise of Fundamentalism and the Ku Klux Khristian thrust toward theocracy remains obscure. Just as the plutocrats fear nothing more than socialism, so do the JesuNazis fear nothing more than the resurrection of the goddess -- not the least because the ethos of the goddess leads directly to feminism and past it to environmentalism and finally to eco-socialism: thus the unholy alliance of capitalism and theocracy -- complete with the sort of oppression we witnessed recently in Utah: soldiers and storm-troopers mobilized to suppress a dance.

I moved to Portland, Oregon last year and get around solely by bicycle. I've done so all my life, but I 'killed' my car six years ago.

Bicycling is better in Portland them many cities, but it is no Eugene, Oregon where I am from and the bicycle is an easy and popular option.

I hate the hemorrhoids of wide, smelly, noisy roads encircling the core area of Portland like it was one big concrete anus. I hate the gratuitous honking at bikes for no reason. There is an attitude of entitlement car owners have to the road too that just drives me up the wall.

At fifty-one I am six foot six inches and weigh 150 pounds with a resting pulse rate of about fifty BPM. I am mistaken for someone much younger then I am. I am able to live more comfortably on far less money then I did with a car.

But the road is engineered with cars in mind, and often you have to go go go to just keep from getting into it with the steel coffins around you. Bikes are banned from fast food drive up windows, and if you stop anywhere - which you simply have to do on a bike, you have no privacy as there is less and less public space all the time in our cities, as many people lounge, eat, entertain themselves and loiter in their cars and the city is engineered with that in mind.

Often the riding is boring and dreary with to much friction with the auto set. I more likely then not will quit my job and go home to Eugene simply because I loath automobiles and how they blight my life and reduce my standard of living. There is nothing like a car to give me a good case of animosity and loathings, and do my best to not even passenger in them.

I have had two autos in my life, both VW bugs. Both used machines and I still have one moldering in a country town in Lane County.

I dream of the day people wake up and see the car is a big ugly tumor on the butt of the United States and should be excised surgically.

I am all for 5 dollar a gallon gasoline, even if it creates a huge spike in inflation. I have felt nothing but joy watching the prices go up. May the keep doing so and never fall.

And I couldn't be more serious then I am about that, as unpopular a sentiment it is to the automobile addicts.

At fifty-one I am six foot six inches and weigh 150 pounds with a resting pulse rate of about fifty BPM. I am mistaken for someone much younger then I am.

This ubermenschen smugness -- genuinely fascist in its egotistical mirror-gazing worship of physical perfection -- is one of the elements I find most off-putting about today's bourgeoisie, all the more so when it comes cloaked in Democratic disguise. Not everyone is as fortunate as you; I for example bicycled all over Manhattan when I lived there during the '60s, but knee and back injuries in the '70s ended my bicycling forever, and arthritis now makes many more physical activities painfully difficult.

I am all for 5 dollar a gallon gasoline, even if it creates a huge spike in inflation. I have felt nothing but joy watching the prices go up.

This expression aligns you solidly with the most reactionary elements in America, especially in terms of your hostility toward those of us who are not plutocrats and therefore must work for a living. These gasoline prices are literally forcing millions of lower-income working families into indentured servitude: the compulsory alternative that (thanks to Bush and his Congress) has now replaced bankruptcy as the only allowable exit from overwhelming debt.

I myself am retired and live on a tiny pension supplemented by freelance writing for a non-profit advocacy publication. For reasons noted above, I cannot bicycle, and I can no longer afford to operate my automobile save for occasions of the most dire need -- which means I suffer the huge theft of time inflicted on all of us who are forced to ride the herky-jerky slow uncomfortable buses characteristic of most American public transport. There are millions like me -- and millions more whose circumstances are far worse -- and you feel "nothing but joy": an astoundingly truthful admission given the self-portrait it provides: that you would celebrate hardships inflicted on working families by political betrayals perpetrated by treacherous politicians in service to Oil Barons and Car Lords.

And I couldn't be more serious then I am about that, as unpopular a sentiment it is to the automobile addicts.

Your (typically bourgeois) penchant for bigoted generalization just damned me (and everyone like me) as an "automobile addict," never mind the fact I have been a staunch advocate of public transport all my working life, and would happily live car-less (as I joyfully did in New York City) were the circumstances to allow it.

That such damnation appears here on DU is a perfect illustration of the class hatred -- also scorn and contempt with which the bourgeoisie view all the rest of us -- that explains perfectly how the Democratic Party has been reduced to little more than an auxiliary of the ruling Republican oligarchy.

We desperately need to build adequate public transport: "adequate" defined as powered by electricity and running on rails. Buses should never be more than a supplement to a rail system -- just as they are in New York City -- and not the mainstay they are elsewhere in the U.S. (and throughout the Third World). Bicycles are an alternative only for the young; they demand a physical conditioning most of us could never possibly achieve in adulthood -- especially those of us who suffer from the arthritis, back and joint injuries characteristic of advancing age. Meanwhile -- as expensive and environmentally destroying as the automobile is -- we need fuel-price controls (and possibly even rationing) to protect American workers from savage price-gouging by the oil industry: the same price-gouging to which your "joy" is such Marie Antoinette encouragement.

You are the one using elitist wording here, dude. I have no damn idea what 'ubermenschen' means. ;-)

I broke both my arms liquefying my wrists and lower arm bones, dislocated my right elbow and have my share of infirmaries. Sure can be a drag being part of the human race, yes?

Rest assured, I know good and damn well I will grow old and die just like everyone else. That you begrudge me my happiness at being fit despite having a near fatal incident in 1998, says you are here in drag as Ms. Piggy, not I.



America should have avoided it's love affair with the pukemobile. now shouldn't it have?

Naturally my emotionally supercharged interlocutor, there are always going to be needs to provide transportation to those who cannot bicycle. Obviously it is not an option for everyone.

If one attenuates their eyes to see the asphalt voids parking lots and roads leave in out polluted cities, just how much of the newspaper is dedicated to autos, and not how many use them who have much too much automobile then they need for ego and whatever reason - not to mention frivolous use of autos, there is a vast room to get rid of a great deal of this cancerous culture right before yer little peepers. Interesting how we become blind to what we do to ourselves as a culture, yes?




I have posted on many forums over the last ten years, and I have never not seen someone try this 'smoking the newbie like a cheap cigar routine.' so stow the ego.

If you have a point to make, make it without the clap trap temperamental verbiage. It does not impress me.

I wrote that post late last night when I desperately wanted to go to sleep but could not because of a bad cold.

Was the post you responded to perfect? Nope. It was written by me though I had had enough posting for the night because I was impressed by your position on mass transit.

If you want as good as you get in temperamentally, I sure can oblige. I write too and work as a forest activist in Oregon and use the Amtrak bus often from Eugene and Portland, furnish low income people with bikes as I can, (I worked as a bike mechanic many years and raced and toured a great deal.) and have even repaired a VW bug or two and helped out friends with funds if their car got towed for tickets and many other things.

I ain't perfect Charlie, but I do what I can to make the world better, not worse. I broke my arms and head in a fall from a tree during a protest when a security guard pulled my rope, and am well known locally and while I am nobody special for being put in that bad situation, I have handled a great deal of real time news media and tree hugger haters. Good luck trying to get me squeal like a pig as you do in this response of yours.

You are invited to start over without the attitude. Or use your bozo feature and not see my responses to your posts whenever I see one.

Because I'll tell you what, all you do to me is amuse me and set the stage for an interesting game of verbal brinkmanship.

And believe me, I would prefer to get along, but I am not in the least bit intimidated by little arrogant you at all.
Have a nice day. ;-D

with which you (ever more obviously) go about them. And anyone with the slightest knowledge of European history knows the term ubermenschen; if that has become "elitist," than America's public ignorance is far worse than I had assumed.

Nor am I surprised by your disclosure you are an environmentalist: one of the two wedge-groups that by their anti-working-class hatefulness -- spiking trees instead of demanding reforms like selective logging (which would save jobs AND forests) -- has shattered the Democratic Party quite probably beyond repair. (The other wedge-group is the anti-gunners. Both groups are the organized expression of the anti-working-class malice that has sundered the party since the Vietnam Era.)

While I will sometimes withdraw from a debate with unmistakable finality, I don't normally bozo people off -- even when they call me "dude." Instead I always hope in their next post I will see some evidence they are awakening to mindfulness -- especially true of someone with whom, at least in aversion to the Oil Barons and the Car Lords (though certainly not in immediate solutions to the Oil Baron/Car Lord problem), I surely agree.

That said, I rest my case.

Err, hey guy you don't have a humor quotient, don't you? My crack on the word was meant in that realm.

You have allot of damn nerve accusing me tacitly of spiking trees, son. I do Non-violent civil disobedience, and no dissent that actually hurts the message I am trying to get across. I have never, ever sanctioned such activity.

By the way, anyone with the slightest knowledge of environmental advocacy in the forest involves the principle of "Deep Ecology." Man, it is amazing how indicative of how little education people have generally, but Deep Ecology is a way of looking at life differently then the 'extract some, cut the rest later' routine you talk about in your naivety. (Hey your first comment begged this teasing, yes?)

All living things have the right to live unto themselves for their own value to themselves. You cannot replicate a forest primeval in forty to sixty year old same species units. I have spend a great deal of time in the canopies of tree stands and woodland where the trees averaged 500-800 years old.

These trees have thick moss and an entire ecosystem in them from insects to birds to rodent like tree voles.

We have saved many stands by doing tree vole survey work ourselves that forces the USFS to remove that particular area from the chopping block because of the ESA. (You do have the education and political efficacy to know what that is I assume?) (More earned teasing.)

It is not enough to cut everything out there in a staggered progression. Some forest needs to be preserved for the value it has unto itself, and for the unique and irreplaceable attributes such stand have that no tree silva culture tree plantation 40-60 years out at cut will have.

I actually worked out in the woods after I graduated college and know what I am talking about.

We do not hate the working class, we support it. Charles Hurwitz of Maxxon bought Pacific Lumber Company in California in a hostile takeover. He ended guaranteed jobs and housing. He gutted the pension fund (later restored as per court order) tripled the cut and ended a world class sustained yield cutting program.

He saw the standing assets of PALCO as manna from heaven and bought and raped the victim shipping the capital garnered from this operation overseas for industrial investment there.

He and others like him are the working class's enemy, not little old us. I planted, picked cones, bud capped, sprayed big game repellent, shade blocked and paper mulched seedlings, I've done stream improvement, worked on wild land forest fires and about twelve years of that sort of of hard work. I always have been an outdoor person, an iconoclast on top of it and never want a suit job.

Forest Activists are the enemy of the working class my rear end. Ask those who hire Latinos to work at a fraction of the wage I got in the wood if they are friends of the working class; because you are off azimuth here by several degrees.

I have received considerable flack from some for condemning the Earth Liberation Front and their ecotage activities. They hurt my advocacy, not help it.

I first went on Free Republic with the stories about the fall a security guard precipitated in an incense cedar in front of the Nike Store site in Eugene, Oregon. You are welcome to check the veracity of my words at anytime. I have always posted in the open using my name, and the Register Guard in Eugene, Oregon can verify I am well known there, peaceful, and have done this a long long time.

In any event, despite the outrageousness of the stereotypical comment concerning spiking, thanks for the improvement in civility on your part.

Michael Joseph McCarthy, Cascadia Forest Defenders/ Southern Willamette EF!

And I am most assuredly not your "son" -- though given the age at which I started having sex, you are surely young enough to have been mine.

As to civility, it was your very lack of it to which I initially responded: not only your boast of "nothing but joy" at the economic destruction of an entire class of people, but the singles-bar preening in your self-description: "At fifty-one I am six foot six inches and weigh 150 pounds with a resting pulse rate of about fifty BPM. I am mistaken for someone much younger then I am." I am an old bohemian -- the very last person anyone would label "puritanical," but frankly I found it offensive -- and not a little bit overbearing: I cannot imagine the need for such flagrant brandishing of physique in any writing outside of a personals advertisement.

That said, I also stand behind my accusation of class-hatred in the environmental movement -- something that has been very well documented by the Left (Google for example "environmental racism"), something that was the subject of a hotly debated thread here on DU a couple of months ago, and something that certainly has also been witnessed firsthand by anyone who has even once covered the logger-environmentalist and environmentalist-fisher/hunter conflicts that have convulsed Washington state for the past 30 years. The developer/environmentalist conflicts are particularly eye-opening because they show how (given the hopelessly bourgeois core values of too many environmentalists) legitimate hostility against developers quickly deteriorates into wholly misplaced hostility against construction workers -- an interesting and profoundly revealing replay of the construction-worker/war-protester battles characteristic of 1970: less physically violent albeit far more verbally hateful. This is so commonplace I cannot believe you have not witnessed the same phenomenon.

Yet amidst of all this conflict I am in the curious and potentially schizoid position of supporting probably in toto the goals of environmentalism (even the deep ecology movement) while opposing many (though surely not all) of the tactics the environmentalist movement has employed -- and opposing absolutely all of the elitist hate-the-workers hostility that virtually everyone I know (including environmental activists) agrees is the environmental movement's most self-defeating and therefore problematical quality.

Moreover -- I tell you this to make my position clear -- my support for environmentalism is neither theoretical nor abstract: my spirituality is absolutely pagan -- not in the fad sense of belonging to some alleged "coven" but in the deepest emotional sense of acknowledging the universe as the physical body of the goddess and, simultaneously, recognizing the obvious intellectual truth of the Gaea Hypothesis.

Approximately two thirds of my life has been spent in some sort of regular and frequently intimate interaction with "nature" -- a term I put in irony-quotes because even as a child I always sensed its psycholinguistic connotation of something implicitly apart from the human norm -- a conceptual separation that seemed not only distancing but oppressive (though it would be many more years before I understood just why). During my boyhood and teens I was fortunate enough to live summers in the Au Sable country of northern Lower Michigan, which then (though it had been logged in the 1870s) was still genuine wilderness: no electricity until 1956 (and therefore no refrigeration, no indoor plumbing or running water), no telephones either. During that same period I spent my schoolyears in the South -- mostly Appalachia -- where I came to know parts of the Cherokee National Forest -- especially the Jeffrey's Hell wilderness (North Fork Citico Creek) -- nearly as well as I knew the Au Sable country. There is (or was) old-growth forest there, also at points along the Appalachian Trail and somehow preserved too in Michigan's Hartwick Pines State Park, and I know its accompanying sense of raw naked exquisite primeval totality -- a sense for which English sadly lacks any adequate term at all and a sense I experienced again in old-growth forest in the Olympic Mountains and what is now the North Cascades Wilderness Area. In fact I know it to such a degree I long ago concluded mankind's true original sin (if indeed any such sin exists) is the unnecessary desolation of wild places: as much I applaud the Tennessee Valley Authority and how it literally saved the South, when the Rural Electrification Administration strung its accursed wire into the Au Sable country, I secretly wept: as if I heard not with my ears but in my deepest heart a dread sound that had once infuriated my long ago ancestors to open rebellion: the ring of Roman axes in the sacred groves of Britain. Perhaps too -- since I am a small part Mohawk -- the softer but equally deadly sound of shod horses in the forests of the Iroquois.

The great conflict of my life was always the conflict between journalism and my love of wilderness. Journalism demanded my presence not just in a city but specifically in New York City -- the only workplace milieu where I have ever been truly valued -- especially since I am what in the South was considered "white trash," have absolutely no social or familial connections and am further professionally disadvantaged by the anti-career odium of a Civil Rights arrest 42 years ago in Tennessee: an absolute barrier to employment on any really major publication even in NYC, but not sufficient to keep me off some extremely high quality smaller publications, all of them in Manhattan or its immediate vicinity.

Nevertheless as much as I loved working in the City, living there was destroying my soul. Having some earlier experience on a very good rural newspaper in the South, I moved from Manhattan to Western Washington state hoping to facilitate a professional/spiritual compromise: working in journalism while still having immediate access to real country, including what was then the finest (hike-in) back-country trout fishing in the entire Lower 48. Instead what I got for myself was decades of grueling struggle: hand-to-mouth freelancing, wage-slave staff jobs on third-rate newspapers, an increasingly difficult quest for work turned ever more bitter by this area's relentless and eternally unforgiving xenophobic hatred of outlanders. The access to wilderness was absolutely the only thing that made being in the Pacific Northwest worthwhile, and that access was sharply restricted by the injuries sustained in a late-'70s car wreck -- I was broadsided by a speeding drunk, and the permanent damage to my spine decreed I would never again be able to hump even the backpack essential to an overnight trip -- much less the supplies required by the three-to-seven-day trips to which I had been accustomed since my teens. And by then it was too late for any successful return to the City: as it says in the song, I had already been "too long in the wasteland." Nevertheless I survived, and until 14 months ago, I had managed to live 18 consecutive years in Cascade foothills country -- an eden of forest and meadow and grow-all-my-own-vegetables organic gardens where I chuckled for months at the fact an elk herd once in a single night ate my entire crop of winter broccoli: I had been tardy in renewing the bags of dog hair affixed to the garden fence as wards. Even so it was a blessed place, all the more so for the elk -- the regularly visiting herd numbered about 30. Ravens lived in my orchard, juncoes, chickadees, towhees and wrens flocked to my sunflowers and picked my vegetables clean of insects. My home was close by a stand of very old second-growth cedar; I occupied a small wood-heated cabin in which I could fall asleep listening to the rain on the roof in air perfumed by the spice of burning alder. It was the one place I trusted enough to believe I would spend the rest of my life there -- the place from which I was suddenly and painfully ousted by a change of ownership last year: outside of Manhattan my income has always been too small to permit me to buy a house and land, and in Manhattan (where it was always quite sufficient to purchase real estate somewhere out in America), it was always too small to buy anything within the five boroughs. Now of course it is also too small to allow me to ever move back to the country again, and at my age -- 65 -- there is not even the faintest possibility my earnings will do anything but dwindle. As a consequence I will never again hear the coyotes call or owls hoot or songbirds sing or the rush of wind in ancient cedars, will never again see hummingbirds or the stars undarkened by city lights or the moon unbeclouded by urban smog or welcome back the swallows as I did when they returned in the spring to their homes beneath my eves. Being ousted from all this is truly the worst heartbreak in a life of heartbreaks. My associated permanent banishment from the companionship of dogs -- another loss that is forever due to the restrictions of the housing in which I am condemned by economics to spend the remainder of this ever more wretched lifetime -- merely intensifies the hurt. So do not for even an instant presume my love of wilderness is somehow less impassioned -- or less worthy -- than yours.

Do not either assume I am a blanket advocate of "extract some, cut the rest later" policies. For reasons both environmental and spiritual, I know very well "some forest needs to be preserved for the value it has unto itself." Actually I would say much more than "some" -- vast tracts of forest, even: in fact I cheer every lawsuit that blocks the cutting of old growth, whether I know the details or not.

A big part of my point is therefore that -- not the least because of my own perpetual and inescapable poverty -- I am powerfully aware of the absolute necessity of reckoning economics (and therefore class struggle) into any environmental protection equation (or for that matter any human equation at all): selective logging is part of the answer to the paycheck issue of restricted logging simply because selective logging is labor intensive. Nowhere did I say -- and I certainly did not imply -- that it is the only answer. Another answer would be a massive New Deal type work-and-retraining program for displaced loggers -- and others (including commercial fishers) displaced by environmental regulations: especially work and retraining that would include the infinite psychological blessing of allowing woods folk to stay in the woods and sea people to remain on the water and both to thereby escape the fluorescent hell and spiritual concentration camp of the modern corporate workplace. But capitalists won't allow such programs -- "too expensive" -- and environmentalists repeatedly make it clear they don't give a tinker's damn about those (anti-human rather than anti-environment) manifestations of capitalism: just as you celebrate the epic ruination inflicted by skyrocketing fuel prices. In this climate, ANY work-producing suggestion is far better than the movement's "fuck the loggers -- they're just trash" silent indifference to economic savagery, but that is precisely the attitude (spoken or not) of every environmentalist I have ever met. Thus the retaliation expressed by the common Pacific Northwest bumper-sticker: "I Vote Jobs Not Owls" -- another of the many reasons the usurper Bush is president.

Though the environmental/economic dichotomy is ultimately a Big Lie served up by the oligarchy to keep us divided in every way possible, the hostility between environmentalists and workers in extraction industries (and more frequently former workers in those industries) has gone so far and has become so intense, there is probably no way it will ever be overcome: not until capitalism itself is recognized as the ultimate evil it has become -- the ultimate extension of the doomsday-machine impulse at the core of the Abrahamic religions. Perhaps then will capitalism be replaced by socialism -- or more specifically, by eco-socialism -- the only economic system in which genuine environmental protection would be a given. But that will take decades, perhaps another century: development of the supportive analysis, evolution of the requisite cadre and organization, preparation of the essential agitprop materials, mobilization, neutralization of capitalism, nullification of implicitly pro-capitalist and anti-environment Abrahamic religion, final triumph of the people -- one hopes entirely via the ballot: the fulfillment and vindication of our Constitution. Until that happens (and we will probably all be long dead when it does,) any notion of genuine victory is absurd: witness in this context the ongoing co-optation of the Democratic Party. Hence all we are doing -- every one of us -- is waging our small wars in the name of personal honor: e.e. cummings "There is some shit I will not eat." We are all marking time, fighting such brushfire battles as erupt in our own yards: a cause all the more worthy for its seeming hopelessness, a cause in which (despite my profound objections to your attitudes) I not only wish you the very best but consider myself a comrade.

I would however urge you to never forget that here in this Constitutional democracy, true strength still lies with the people. Especially now -- in a time of worsening economic crisis (and approaching economic collapse) -- environmentalists need to ask themselves why they alienate so many more people than they recruit, what environmentalists might do to reverse that dismal pattern of events, and how environmentalists might then fit themselves into the vital effort of recruiting a broader progressive constituency. That -- and really only that -- has been my point from the very beginning.


Edit: revising a sentence (sixth paragraph).

No insult was even intended nor was I ever trying to do more in my first post then express my frustration and lack of resonance with the city. I feel like a stranger in my own land and I worry about where the primary factors driving the destruction of the natural world, which of course is our unfettered population growth. Unchecked capitalism unfettered in recent decades by any reasonable regulation turned all too cancerous by globalization is also very much a big factor in our collective situation we are in at the start of the 21st Century, but much of the dynamics creating our problems is quite simply there are too many humans on this planet.

I fear for my world and even my species. I like to sit reading or writing long hand in the full bloom of my Luddite ways by the Willamette in Portland. I like the perspective, putting the skyline of the city eye to eye with me. I see a culture that never found a reasonable balance in what it does and unwilling to admit our species doesn't understand the need to settle into a niche that respects all life, not just human life. I often speak to it and of it better from that vantage point.

It is three fifteen in the morning, and I still have my cold sapping my energy and a excruciating headache. Even though I can't sleep easily I better try to do so anyway.

I will be back to finish saying what I want to say. My mind is as sluggish as my slow painful ride downtown Thursday morning bespoke how little punch this cold has left my legs. I even rode Tri-Met back home, forgetting to lift the bike carrier to it's stowed position until the drive prompted me with her horn.

Colds are no fun. Part of the problem too I see in retrospect is an arrogant assumption that my writing level remains high without the necessary attention to it, and that stylistic trappings from other forums with more familiar interlocutors translate well to this forum. I'm going to bookmark this thread and give my ringing head a break and come in a day or so when I can much more closely keep up with you. You are indeed a very good writer with an interesting perspective on things.

I really would like to share some of my insights concerning my brethren in the movement and more of my perspective on the topic too. From the sound of your impression of environmental activists, it is very likely you would find them interesting.

I have been posting on other forums with people who all too often do not write well, and writing with trappings of board culture from there does not work here. A reality check I am grateful for you giving me.

And it is very pleasant to see this forum has such a good caliber of people on it. It was silly of me to ignore it so long.

Have a good weekend, I will be back Sunday or Monday when I am in the office back in Eugene and my weekend's work in Portland is done.

I'll review the string of post too as it behooves me to understand fully where and how the rancor was sparked, and I accept my just share of the blame for that. Thanks again, and talk to you very soon.

"Today, President Bush and Republicans face a political environment that, as reflected in current polling numbers, is the most negative environment of his Presidency," said Republican pollster Ed Goeas. "...Democrats are soaring with new found respect from the voters...but they have done little to project themselves as having the solutions to the Nation's problems."

Duhhh--maybe that's because the Republicans ARE the nation's problems and getting RID of them is the solution!!!

:headbang:
rocknation