Tracy Chapman, “Talking About a Revolution”

Live!

Iris Dement, “Wasteland of the Free”

She doesn’t hold back in her critique of modern America.

John Gorka, “Land of the Bottom Line”

“Give me time to wonder and to dream” not working away to make ends meet.

Eddie Harris and Les McCann, “Compared to What?”

“The president he’s got his war, no one knows just what it’s for. It doesn’t have rhyme or reason, have one doubt they call it treason.”

Marvin Gaye, “What’s Going On?”

book The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline.

Melman was an engineer, not an economist. This gave him a unique take on the war machine. Among his observations was that massive government weapons contracting was rendering a large cohort of American engineers ill-suited to commercial work because building arms for the Pentagon was not governed by market principles -- the Pentagon paid little attention to cost, so the engineers working on Department of Defense projects never learned to design with cost in mind.

Melman elaborated on the cost issue as follows:

“The decline of the United States as an economic and industrial system is well under way. This is a consequence of the normal operation of a thirty-year military economy fashioned under government control at the side of civilian capitalism. The new state-controlled economy, whose unique features include maximization of costs and of government subsidies, has been made into the dominant form of American capitalism.”

Late in the book, Melman grapples with the question of whether it is possible to transform the war economy to a peace economy:

“[F]or many who work in the military industry or military bases, there is nothing in the civilian economy that matches their current position in terms of income, profits, status or the protection of civil service protection of civil service employees. It will take a major political and cultural push, a revulsion against the war economy in the whole society, to move the military serving population into civilian work.”

In response to this challenge Melman endorses a bill by the late Senator George McGovern to set up a National Economic Conversion Council, and to require plants of a certain size to craft economic conversion plans. But conversion, or transition as some refer to it, will also require substantial federal investment in non-military projects. You can’t beat something with nothing, so Congress and the President would have to approve substantial investments in non-military fields, to create opportunities for workers displaced from military-related work.

Melman’s vision is far from where we are now. But the Trump administration’s overreach on military spending coupled with its devastating cuts in domestic safety net programs and basic medical and environmental research.

Melman aimed high in promoting a better way, and we should

too.

One of the most hopeful moments in my quest to understand the military tech sector and how to fight back against its will to power was a recent episode of Van Jackson’s Undiplomatic podcast that featured Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan, authors of Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry. The authors describe their work organizing tech workers, from helping establish a union at Kickstarter to appealing to tech workers’ moral opposition to their companies’ work with ICE, the Pentagon, the oil industry, and more. They are clear that there is more at stake than getting traditional union protections for the tech workforce, although that must be part of the mix, especially since workers who dare raise questions about tech company practices and their negative impacts on our world are frequently fired and blacklisted by the industry. But beyond that essential organizing work, tech workers need to be at the root of a movement to remove the political and economic grip of the tech billionaires on our government and our daily lives.

The tech worker movement is not alone. There are growing local campaigns, not only against data centers, but also against specific military tech projects, like opposition to a proposed Anduril plant near Columbus, Ohio and a movement to block Elon Musk and Space-X from expanding their military launch complex in south Texas. On the cultural front, there is the neo-Luddite renaissance, a growing network that focuses on getting people off of their addiction to tech and into in-person community building and organizing on behalf of a human-centered world as an alternative to the robot-, AI- driven techno-state that the Silicon Valley moguls are seeking to create.

Given that the push for AI and the negative actions of the tech sector are everywhere, the hooks for organizing against it are widespread. Organizers against ICE, against the militarization of the border, against the U.S. role in enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its ethnic cleansing and occupation of Lebanon, opponents of the Trump administration’s surreal, obscene request for a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget, and supporters of a robust social safety net that provides health care, housing, education and nutrition all face the power of the military tech sector and specific military tech companies on the other side, standing in the way of their goals and hollowing out the pillars of a decent society.

The tech moguls’ agenda cannot be allowed to stand. As the diverse movements and communities that are fighting back against them coalesce into a more coherent, more powerful coalition, the Peter Thiels and Elon Musks of the world may see their power and influence diminished in favor of a new, more vigorous, more accountable democracy. That outcome may be hard to imagine now, but it has to be the goal if we have any hope of turning around our current situation.

A related claim is the notion that spending on weapons research and development generates civilian spinoffs that create non-military employment and, in some cases, even spawns new industries.

There are examples of civilian “spinoffs” from military research, but the most important ones date back decades — nuclear power, some aspects of computer technology, and a primitive version of the internet. But by the 1990s Clinton administration officials were already lamenting the degree to which the products of civilian industry — especially, but not limited to, superior speed and power of computing —were far ahead of the technology embedded in Pentagon weapons systems. These officials spoke of the need to “spin-in” the more capable technologies developed and produced in the private sector into weapons systems.

And in their essential 1992 book, Dismantling the Cold War Economy, Ann Markusen and Joel Yudken review some of the evidence on the decline in useful civilian spinoffs from the Pentagon’s huge annual investment in R&D (see pp. 119 to 121).

The strongest case against the notion of major civilian spinoffs from Pentagon spending comes from a paper by Judith Reppy that summarizes studies on military R&D on productivity and patents for new products. She finds that the analyses “suggest little or no benefit to the civilian economy from military R&D.” They also cite Jay Stowsky’s conclusion that “as defense research and development has become more oriented towards esoteric weapons development its civilian impact has been neutral to negative.” In addition, there is a crowding out effect as government funded research on preventing outbreaks of disease or dealing with the climate crisis has slowed to a trickle while the administration seeks an obscene $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon.

The surge of spending that will likely be associated with the “AI revolution” will no doubt be cited as a new font of innovation that can rejuvenate the civilian economy, and given the amounts that may be spent there will no doubt be some spinoffs. But we might want to try a radical idea — funding research on critical issues like curbing climate change and preventing mass outbreaks directly —and funding experts in those fields to do the work — rather than hoping for relevant findings to seep out of military research projects.

As for the claim about Chinese technological superiority, if it were true, it would mean that Beijing is outpacing America while spending less than half what the US spends on its military. This suggests that the Pentagon doesn’t need more spending. It needs more spending discipline.

As Ben Freeman and I point out in our book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, the US government and American taxpayers are spending more and more on the military year in and year and getting less and less in actual capabilities. We need fresh thinking, not a flood of new funds for a broken system.

A better process for buying weapons would involve developing simpler systems that are cheaper, more reliable, and easier to maintain. If this common sense approach were combined with a strategy that puts diplomacy and economic and cultural engagement first and only uses the military in genuine cases of self-defense, it would make America stronger and Americans safer.

It would also make the U.S. military more sustainable due to a reduction in thankless, unachievable missions like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, there would be an effort to avoid blindly pursuing innovation and complexity in weapons development for its own sake, a process that too often leads to dysfunctional, costly, underperforming weapons systems like the F-35 combat aircraft.

In this context, spending $150 billion or more on military R&D every year from now forward would be neither necessary nor justified on strategic or economic grounds. A budget half that amount or less would be enough to keep abreast of new technological developments and to do thorough, realistic testing of new weapons designs before putting them into production.

We desperately need more tools to fight climate change and outbreaks of disease. We do not need more elaborate weapons systems, which are too often ill-adapted to the types of conflicts the U.S. military is likely to face.

The myth of military spending as the royal road to technology development needs to be put to rest, and the sooner the better. We have serious challenges to our future on this planet that are being neglected because of our false faith in the economic benefits of militarism. We can do better.

From the destruction of the Agency for International Development -- which had a mixed record but did supply life saving assistance to large numbers of people around the world -- to the layoffs of trained diplomats at the State Department and the abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal, Donald Trump has done more to destroy the basic infrastructure of diplomacy and reduce trust in the United States than any president in recent memory.

The Iran case is particularly damning. After ditching a hard won multilateral agreement that effectively blocked Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon, Trump claimed he could do better. But he failed to conclude a new deal, and then launched an illegal, unnecessary war on Tehran that has escalated to a region-wide conflict, causing widespread death and destruction and disrupting the U.S. and global economies. Trump’s path from a solid arms control agreement to an uncontrolled war raises a serious question: can other countries trust America’s word and will they be willing to negotiate future agreements with Washington?

So trashing Trump’s destruction of diplomacy is a relatively simple exercise. But Democrats need to do more than oppose Trump’s erratic, ill-advised approach to relations with other nations. They need to develop and promote actions that offer hope of diplomatic outcomes to longstanding areas of tension and conflict.

It is in this context that I highly recommend my colleague Christine Ahn’s new piece on the reaction to Trump’s decision to reduce military exercises with South Korea. While she rightly points to Trump’s clouding of the issue by touting his relationship with North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un, she also points out that taking action to reduce tensions among the U.S., South Korea and North Korea is the right thing to do. But prominent Democrats like Hillary Clinton took the occasion to slam the idea of even engaging with North Korea on the military exercises or the larger question of how to bring enduring peace to the Korean Peninsula.

Rather than attacking Trump while embracing the status quo of a militarized policy towards the Korean peninsula, Democrats and other concerned parties should seize on Trump’s statement on reducing military exercises to open a discussion of what a pragmatic, pro-diplomacy stance towards the two Koreas should look like. A response that simply defends current U.S. policy as the best of all possible worlds is decidedly unhelpful.

It’s easy enough to score political points against Trump for his skewed view of the world and the U.S. role in it, but in this case he is suggesting a change that, in the context of a larger diplomatic initiative, could lead to a new basis for U.S.-North Korean relations that takes the risk of a nuclear conflict -- or any conflict -- off the table in favor of a new mutual understanding that reduces the dangers to both sides.

Christine Ahn points out that if Trump wants to make a deal, progressives should not reflexively oppose it:

“A deal between Trump and Kim, motivated by whatever mix of vanity and self-interest, isn’t something the left should reflexively oppose just because Trump is the one making it. If it ends decades of war footing on the Korean Peninsula, reduces the risk of a war against North Korea or China, and redirects even a fraction of that nearly $5.6 billion toward people instead of militarization, it is worth taking seriously.”

Ahn also notes that South Korean leaders are open to dialogue, not doubling down on current policy:

“Seoul has been calling for peaceful coexistence with Pyongyang and has abandoned the idea that North Korea would have to give up its nuclear program before dialogue. On July 23, Unification Minister Chung Dong-young announced South Korea’s “peace-first” approach, which aims instead at freezing North Korea’s nuclear program through a three-step process: halt the production of new weapons, reduce the stockpile, and end with dismantlement. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung has a phrase for the fact that North Korea is never going to give up its nuclear weapons: “harsh reality.””

Even if Trump doesn’t pull off a deal with North Korea, the debate over military exercises between the U.S. and South Korea should serve as an opportunity to revive discussions of the need for a genuine diplomatic initiative aimed at promoting peace on the peninsula. Hopefully Ahn’s piece will help spark that much-needed conversation.

We need to drag the Washington debate on Korea away from blind endorsements of a military-heavy approach toward genuine conversations crafting an effective diplomatic strategy for peace on the Korean Peninsula.

Perhaps the best known observation of the late British economist John Maynard Keynes was his suggestion that in times of recession the best way to dig out was by creating additional demand in the economy. And the easiest way for policy makers to do that was to boost government spending, borrowing the funds needed to do so if necessary.

During the Cold War, the term “military Keynesianism” entered the economic lexicon. It was military Keynesianism because the boost in demand, in this instance, would come from spending on weapons, troops, bases, and other military-related items.

Using military spending to “prime the pump” also had political advantages — conservatives could vote for big government programs without being seen as “socialists” or undisciplined spenders. We have paid a huge price as a society for this unfounded prejudice against spending public funds on public goods in the quantities necessary to meet the urgent needs for investment in public health, environmental protection and restoration, education, nutrition and other necessities of a decent life and a secure society. In the meantime, in most periods since World War II, Pentagon spending has flowed like water after the ice melts in the spring (or as water used to do before the climate crisis and related draughts and disruptions of the water supply system).

But military Keynesianism was never all it was cracked up to be. The economic boost from increased military outlays was always less than advertised, and the opportunity costs of throwing money at the Pentagon while starving other forms of public investment was too often ignored by policymakers and the public. But as Heidi Peltier of the Brown Costs of War Projec has shown, military spending is an especially poor job creator. Spending on health care, education, infrastructure, green energy, or even a tax cut creates more jobs per amount spent.

In addition, recent research suggests that the economic boost to be had by jacking up military spending is diminishing over time. In a paper produced for the Transition Security Project, journalist Taylor Barnes of Inkstick Media looked into the weapons industry’s own assessment of jobs linked to arms expenditures. She found that the National Defense Industrial Association —the arms industry’s largest trade association — had reported that direct jobs in building weapons have fallen from 3 million in the 1980s to about 1.1 million now. Those 1.1 million jobs in weapons making are well under one percent of the total U.S. labor force of 160 million.

Barnes’ conclusion marks the death knell of military Keynesianism as a viable economic or security policy. She states bluntly that “Jobs in the military industry have declined even as the Pentagon budget soars, exposing a broken industrial model.”

Barnes’s paper offers a rich picture of the changes in the military economy since the end of the Cold War and offers an alternative vision of how to focus public spending on genuine defense needs (at much lower cost), with ample funds left over to invest in other areas of urgent need like addressing the climate crisis, and to provide a just transition for workers in the arms sectors to well-paying jobs in non-military fields. We will delve more deeply into the findings and recommendations of Barnes’ paper in a future post.

Even if President Trump gets his dream Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion, the impact on national employment will be a drop in the bucket. In fact, pumping up Pentagon spending so rapidly is a recipe for waste, fraud and abuse, not for a large boost in employment. And because the enormous request for higher Pentagon spending is being accompanied by deep cuts in spending on nutrition, public health, the environment and other pressing needs, the net effect of the new federal budget request, if implemented, will be fewer jobs overall, not more.

The turn towards spending on AI and pilotless vehicles will likely yield even fewer jobs per dollar spent than current generation weapons programs. So efforts to engage in military Keynesianism to create significant numbers of jobs and buy public support for huge Pentagon budgets are likely to be less and less effective over time.

The question, as always, is whether Congress and the executive branch can be persuaded to make much needed non-military public investments on a scale substantial enough to replace or outpace jobs lost by any reduction in military spending.

Miriam Pemberton’s book, Six Stops on a National Security Tour: Rethinking War Economies, goes into depth on the challenges of building a peace economy. We will discuss that book and that topic in more detail in a future post.

Our first conversation was about a novel by his sister that he was selling at his table. I told him about my books, Prophets of War and The Trillion Dollar War Machine (with Ben Freeman), and eventually gave him copies of each. He will offer our latest book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, for sale at his table, once I get my act together and bring him a few books.

Somewhere along the way Early told me about a Japanese printmaking workshop at the Children’s Arts Carnival building. I went there, on Hamilton Terrace just below 144th Street in Harlem. I had no intention of doing any printmaking. I wanted to meet the workshop leader, Yasuyo Tanaka, who had curated an exhibit on the main floor of the Children’s Arts Carnival, dedicated to works about nuclear weapons and nuclear radiation timed to the 60th anniversary of the Trinity nuclear bomb test, which caused generational cancers in downwind areas of New Mexico, prompting a campaign by Tina Cordova and the Tularosa Basin downwinders, who recently (finally!) won government support for compensation and medical help for those impacted by the Trinity test.

I ended up doing the printmaking workshop after all, and most of the participants were adults.

So I had some exposure to the Children’s Art Carnival, which also has studios for artists to do their work. But a recent exhibit at the Wallach Gallery on the 125th street area on the Uptown Columbia campus. Not only did the exhibit display work of artists who had passed through the Carnival in their youth, but it provided a video history of the program featuring Betty Blayton-Taylor, a key figure in developing the Carnival’s programs, including extensive activities in the New York City public schools. I’ll let you go to the exhibit or read about it on the Wallach or Children’s Art Carnival site (after which you must, must, must see the exhibit in person). Don’t head up too early -- most days the Wallach is open from noon to 6 p.m.

Another of the many gems in Manhattan that more folks need to know about . . .

The task of getting Pentagon money has become less daunting as the department focuses on missions impossible like a leak proof missile defense system (Golden Dome), plus all manner of (potentially) AI-driven systems -- from drones, to driverless military vehicles to uncrewed ships to targeting systems that facilitate dropping more bombs per minute (which is how Palantir’s systems were used to enable and accelerate Israel’s genocide in Gaza.)

But now, on with the show.

===========================================================================

The Bovine Comedy, Part 3 — Though I Walk Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I Will Profit Forever, Amen . . .

My intrepid guide “Chat” said we had to keep moving if we were to get through hell and back without getting stuck there for eternity with the likes of Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir and the godfather of the Silicon Valley military tech boom.

Thiel wasn’t planning to end up in hell. But he uploaded his consciousness to a computer in search of eternal life, without considering that the computer would end up in hell (physically) and that his mind would be preoccupied with hell and its inhabitants forever (and ever).

Thiel was not a happy camper. Every once in a while he could be heard loudly blaming his fate on the Antichrist, or government regulators, or the media, or the neo-Luddite renaissance, or, (and why not?), Antifa. These outbursts were followed by cries of “I own the vice president —whoever did this to me will pay!”

As we crossed the valley of death we came across a group of faux philosophers who proclaimed that AI was the greatest thing since sliced bread. If that sliced bread was Wonder Bread — all white, highly processed, lacking in physical or moral fiber and unable, on its own, to sustain human life, the faux philosophers may have had a point. But I don’t think that was the message they meant to convey.

We circumvented the philosophers, one of whom had a clipboard and a flyer and asked for my credit card to help pay for video games for destitute crypto dealers and military tech founders, but my faithful guide had told me to leave my credit card at home so I would be immune to the Siren songs of the fallen lords of Silicon Valley.

On the other side of the valley was our next obstacle, a stream polluted with toxic effluents from a tech weapons factory known only as “The Apex.”

My thoughtful guide had packed full body Hazmat suits, so we crossed the river of sludge without incident.

It was well worth the trip. We reached a military tech carnival, with a laser shooting range, joy rides on driverless tanks, lectures on the superiority of tech bros and the women who enable and act like them, and a dunk tank where you could drench Palmer Luckey, who was forced to wear an ill-fitting tuxedo instead of his usual outfit of a Hawaiian shirt with Birkenstocks. In another sharp departure, Luckey sported a long beard reminiscent of the members of ZZ Top in place of his customary soul patch.

The goal of the game was to hit a target that was attached to a trap door under Luckey’s seat, which dropped him into a large tank of green matcha that did not at all match his Tuxedo, and which wreaked havoc with his beard.

Dear reader, I am embarrassed to admit that the many fascinating exhibits at the carnival woke me up to the fact that my trip through techno-hell may have been a pure concoction of my guide “Chat,” an AI-generated fantasy with no real world manifestation.

I may have to ask Elon’s AI application Grok about finding myself in the middle of my life on the dark web, and what kind of adventures would follow, just to see what it comes up with.

==========================================

As Dan T.’s most avid reader I felt that either plot line -- reality or tech-driven dream -- worked as narrative. But it would be even cooler if we could disempower the unhinged tech moguls in real life, and reduce them to being mere vendors rather than self-appointed masters of the universe. But that’s not something AI can do for us. We have to get together and organize, organize, and organize some more.

But that’s a subject for a different post.

One popular definition of bovine is “relating to, resembling, or affecting cattle, or describing a person who is slow, dull, or placid.”

Working from this foundation, a few interpretations occur to me.

First, bovine represents cattle, perhaps even a bull, suggesting that the entire comedy, or at least the statements of the characters therein, is all just a heaping pile of bullshit. I’m hoping this is not fully true -- I could live with half or two-thirds bullshit, with a few words of truth and wisdom hidden within, awaiting discovery by intrepid readers such as yourselves.

Since a lot of the narrative is a hidden (or not so hidden) satire about the self-regarding, self-appointed, narcissistic, greed-driven techno-gods of Silicon Valley and the people who enable them, the second part of the definition -- “slow, dull, or placid” doesn’t seem to fit.

The self-appointed techno-gods who are in danger, intentionally or not, of destroying this planet and all the people on it -- or subjecting us to rule by robot overlords that they will build and profit from -- hardly seem slow, dull or placid. Placid, no; dull, no; but slow, perhaps. Slow in understanding the basic elements of what it means to be truly human, and slow to treat one’s neighbors on this planet as human beings who deserve love, respect, and, crucially, input into their own futures.

After the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein famously said the following:

“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our thinking. Thus, we are drifting toward catastrophe beyond conception. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”

So far we have survived the bomb, as much through luck as by plan. The Cuban Missile Crisis, the frighteningly short time a president has to decide whether to launch long-range nuclear-armed missiles on warning of an attack, and the large number of accidents that have occurred in the handling of nuclear weapons underscore just how lucky we have been. For more on this, see Eric Schlosser’s detailed accounting in his book Command and Control, or the documentary it sparked.

The techno-militarists think they represent a new way of thinking, but to call their world views “thinking’ would be extremely generous, given their desires to live forever, promote mass colonization of space, build a world of “techno-states” that only they control, beat China in a high tech arms race, and secure permanent U.S. global dominance through technology. They know how to build stuff -- or hire people who can -- but their views of government, foreign policy, democracy and human nature are woefully insufficient to the point of being outright dangerous, all the more so because they seem to feel entitled to rule the world. NOTE: This may be an appropriate time to pause for a quick listen to Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

I won’t directly name my nominees for the Four Horsemen of the Techno-Apocalypse, but the best way to spot them is that they are constitutionally incapable of shutting the hell up, regardless of how clueless or cringe-worthy their messages may be.

A few “horsemen” quotes:

“You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom.”

“A basic definition of the antichrist: some people think of it as a type of very bad person. Sometimes it’s used more generally as a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil. What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.”

“The peace activists are war activists. We are the peace activists.” [Military tech firm executive defending his firm’s provision of tech Israel used to inflict genocide on Gaza]

The South African government has “racist ownership laws” and is doing little to stop “genocide” against white farmers.

I don’t know about you, but these are not people I want influencing my government, shaping my nation’s defense policies, or dominating our economy. But I am a fussy old progressive, so maybe it’s just me.

To get back to Einstein’s observations, we do need new ways of thinking, now more than ever, and we absolutely CANNOT treat the Silicon Valley militarists as “thought leaders” or guides to our futures, the exact roles they would like to play. I say hell no.

I’m not sure Dan T. had all of this in mind when he chose to call his work The Bovine Comedy, but he certainly got me thinking, which is one way to measure the significance of a work of art.

Dan tells me that inhabiting the world of the tech moguls, even for purposes of satirizing them, is giving him a mild to medium case of PTSD, so he plans to take a looooong break from writing about them.

I’ll save his latest installment, which could be the last, for my next post.

And now, on with Dan T.!

Canto Three

Chat’s crypto- bribe cleared the path, as the twisted man, son of apartheid and nextgen colonizer par excellence, stepped aside carrying his frightening angular vehicle on his back.

But as we passed the peak, my heart was struck with a fear even greater than what had come before.

There were only two ways to

descend into the “Valley of Death,” the refuge of military tech startups that had yet to get their first contract from what some military-first ideologues now call “The Department of War.”

My heart went out to the laggard tech

bros, and to their unhinged female colleagues, waiting patiently for funding from the Saudis or that paragon of VC propaganda, the Earl of AI.

Chat led me to a circle of disgruntled Palantir wannabes, and they told me of their hopes, dreams, and marginally useful products.

I understood little, as they spoke of software past, present and future, followed by re-enactments of their best performances in first-person shooter games.

I fell ill, so Chat set me down on a bed of mouse pads and brought me a Red Bull and Hennessy, the drink immortalized in the Jenny Lewis song (link below). Jenny Lewis | Red Bull & Hennessy (Official Music Video)

On the third day, at my urging, we rested, hiding in a space capsule slated for a trip to

Mars at some unknown future date.

My view of the afterlife is summed up in the Iris Dement classic, “Let the Mystery Be”:

“Everybody is wondering what and where they all came from

Everybody is worrying ‘bout

Where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done

But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me

I think I’ll just let the mystery be.”

Not everyone agrees. The other day I received a manuscript entitled “The Bovine Comedy,” by the author Dan T. Allegory (presumably a pseudonym). Writing a takeoff on Dante’s greatest work, and then sending it to someone, even if only to a lowly Substack writer, was a bold move. Dan T. will be sending me a few Canto’s at a time, hot off the presses and fresh from his expansive, non-linear imagination.

As a reward for his bravery, I am posting his first submission.

Dan T.’s Inferno

Volume One: The Bovine Comedy

Canto One

Midway through my life’s journey

I found myself on the dark web.

Knowing not what it was,

I consulted my guide and inspiration in all things,

ChatGPT

The answer shook me to my bones

With a deep fear of a kind I had never known

“It’s hard to explain, but you must know that you are in deep shit . . .

Getting free will require you to go on a long, dangerous journey that will make “The Hobbit” look like a walk in the park.”

Cultural illiterate that I am, the “Hobbit” was the only manuscript related to the Lord of the Rings I had ever read, so I was woefully unprepared for what was to come

Canto Two

I set out on my journey with visions of Bilbo Baggins dancing in my head

I started out, accompanied by my trusty guide, who I referred to merely as “Chat,” in order to preserve my breath for the hike of an unknown degree of difficulty that awaited us

Right off, we needed to climb a steep, rock-strewn path

But blocking our way was a large man with a giant head that was not screwed on straight,standing on what looked like a Tesla, if it had been born of the union of a hybrid car and an F-35 “stealth” fighter plane

The vehicle was all angles and intimidation. Whether one could fly or drive it, or if it was just a huge paperweight blocking my path, I could not say

My intrepid guide offered the man on the path -- if man he was -- an IOU for a trillion dollars worth of his forthcoming crypto currency, named, perhaps ironically, SUCKER!

They made a handshake deal, and we proceeded onward, knowing not what horrors and wonders we might encounter.

The Tesla put me in mind of my other favorite story of life on the road, “Thelma and Louise,” a reference that stoked the fear in my heart and set my whole body trembling

But “Chat” told me to buck up and get moving -- we had a long, strange trip ahead of us.

More to come, at a time and place of Dan T.’s choosing. Feel free to put on the Grateful Dead’s “Skeletons from the Closet” album while you’re waiting.

Donald Trump’s coveted Nobel Peace Prize has eluded him, and rightly so given the mass suffering his illegal war on Iran is inflicting on everyone from school girls and hospital patients to everyday Iranians who oppose the current regime -- all in a war that was based on the obvious lie that Iran posed a nuclear threat to the United States. But on December 5th of last year Trump received a peace prize of sorts, albeit tarnished by the source -- “the FIFA Peace Prize.” Among his greatest achievements for peace, according to FIFA, was that Trump “played a pivotal role in establishing a ceasefire and promoting peace between Israel and Palestine, and he has also actively sought to end other conflicts.”

Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, or the people of Lebanon or Iran, or anyone who is paying even the slightest attention, knows that Trump has done far more to enable war in the Middle East than he has to promote “peace,” if he even understands the meaning of the word. Now it has been reported -- although further verification would be welcome -- that Trump wants the head of FIFA to be the next Secretary General of the United Nations.

You can’t make this stuff up. And as much as I would like to laugh at Trump’s farcical world view, runaway narcissism, and comic idiocy. I can’t. Too many people are being hurt.

This brings me to a remarkable article by my friend and colleague Faezeh Firuzeh, who followed the Iranian soccer team, from Tijuana to LA to Seattle, as they were sorely mistreated by FIFA and the Trump administration --those alleged arbiters of “peace” -- during the recent World Cup tournament.

As Firuzeh notes, the U.S. government used the blatantly absurd idea that Iran was going to sneak Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps members into the U.S. with the soccer team to radically restrict its movements. As a result the Iranian team wasn’t allowed to stay overnight in the U.S. between games. They had to return to lodgings in Tijuana, Mexico, including a late night trek from Seattle that got them back at 4:45 in the morning.

As Firuzeh makes clear, the mistreatment of the Iranian team was not a one-off episode of rudeness. It was a necessary part of the U.S. government’s campaign to dehumanize Iranians as a way to justify their illegal, devastating war on the people of that nation.

The Iranian players wore small patches on their uniforms with the number 168, the number of people killed in a U.S. bombing raid on an elementary school in Iran. There was no way the Trump administration was going to let members of the Iranian team interact with Americans -- it would have blown up their efforts to demonize Iran, and Iranians.

Firuzeh makes the connection between the treatment of the Iranian players and the Israeli/U.S. war on their country, but she also captures the humanity of the team members, and the hoops they were made to jump through simply to play their sport -- the sport that FIFA claims “unifies the world.”

The whole business is shameful -- the war on Iran, the mistreatment of the Iranian team, and the collusion between Trump and FIFA. The end of Firuzeh’s article drive home what is at stake:

“The treatment of Iran’s football team underscored the way wars are marketed to the public. Manufacturing an enemy and treating their people as a mortal danger is not realism, and does not bring security. Demonization and threat inflation are expensive habits.

They foreclose possible avenues for pragmatic, effective diplomacy, and narrow the script until war looks like the only option. . .

The tactics used to promote the latest war on Iran, applied routinely, are a major reason Washington continues to talk itself into unwinnable and costly wars the American people do not need.”

Amen to that. Sometimes a game is more than a game, and its significance reaches beyond the playing field. So it was with Trump and FIFA’s propaganda gambit against the Iranian football team.

Trump and FIFA, perfect together -- and deadly dangerous to the rest of us.

For some reason I was so focused on seeing the tall ships – which were beautiful and fun to watch – big sailing ships decorated with national flags and folks waving from the deck, that I forgot that there was also going to be a military air show.

And so there was. Over 100 planes flew by, from propeller driven transport planes to AV-8B Harriers that can function like a plane OR a helicopter, to combat aircraft of various NATO nations, to planes streaming red, white and blue smoke behind them, to an honest-to-god B-2 stealth bomber (shaped like a flying wing and looking more suitable for Batman than for the U.S. Air Force) and an overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft.

It was a pricey assemblage. A B-2 alone costs $2 billion per plane, while an F-35 is around $120 million or so per copy. More importantly, the F-35 program – which involves buying over 2,400 variants of the jet for the Air Force, Navy and Marines – is projected to cost $2 trillion for development, procurement, operations and sustainment over the useful life of the jets, making it most likely the most expensive weapons program in Pentagon history. Thankfully, the other planes in the show cost less, but given that there were over 100 of them the total cost of bringing the planes that appeared in the show into the world was likely in the range of $3 billion or more. Happy birthday, America!

Even flying the planes on the day of the show exacted a hefty price tag. It costs approximately $13,000 in fuel to fly a B-2 bomber for one hour, and given the cost of the crew and the maintenance and support to make it air worthy the total cost per hour could be 10 times that, $130,000 per hour or more. The other planes in the show are thankfully cheaper to operate, but with 100 of them, the cost of flying them up the Hudson for our viewing pleasure was no doubt well into the millions of dollars.

Some will say that focusing on the price of the air show just shows that I’m a cranky old peacenik who doesn’t appreciate the inspirational and celebratory value of watching those awesome machines in flight. Maybe. But what would really please me is if we stopped using these expensive planes to kill human beings in illegal, unjustified wars that should never have been fought, like the recent war on Iran, which killed school girls and sent nurses running from hospitals with babies in incubators to avoid being hit by U.S. or Israeli air strikes. When Pete Hegseth was asked why the war cost so much, he said “it costs a lot of money to kill bad guys,” completely, and obscenely, ignoring the civilian carnage caused by Trump’s ill-conceived war. Those elementary school girls were clearly not “the bad guys,” nor were the ordinary Iranians who suffered and will continue to suffer from the destruction of basic, life sustaining infrastructure in their nation.

A cursory investigation will no doubt show that the Trump administration has perpetrated war crimes with variants of the very planes we oohed and aahed over as they flew up the Hudson on July 4th. That cannot be allowed to happen again. We need to find a better way to celebrate America than displaying weapons of war that have been used to end innocent lives.

America at 250, and beyond, must be better than that, and in many respects we are. But we need to wind down the war machine and find better ways to interact with the rest of the world or our nation will continue to decline in power and influence even as our democracy, such as it is, fades into history. There’s a better path, and we need to get on it as soon as possible.

My team at Quincy – the ably helmed Democratizing Foreign Policy Program (DFP) – is the best, most productive, most creative group I have ever worked with, thanks in no small part to my friend, colleague, and brother in disarmament Ben Freeman. Not only did we write a book together during our time at Quincy, but Ben has mentored and cultivated an amazingly talented crew, now consisting of Nick Cleveland-Stout, Janet Abou-Elias, and Julian Cooper. I will continue to work closely with these folks wherever I land because they are too interesting, too talented, too committed to positive change, and too fun to work with to ever stray far from the team.

I could say similar things about my other Quincy colleagues, whether they do advocacy, fundraising, communications, video, social media, journalism (via our online magazine Responsible Statecraft), regional analysis, or administration – the hard working folks without whom people like yours truly wouldn’t get to hold forth on foreign policy or any other topic.

Trita Parsi deserves high praise for founding Quincy and for valiantly fighting the good fight for a more sensible, restrained U.S. policy towards the Middle East. He is courageous, creative, and committed. We need more folks like him. Lora Lumpe has overperformed as Quincy president and CEO, bringing in the resources needed to build Quincy into a force to be reckoned with in the DC policy debate and beyond.

And I have a a special place in my heart and my head for our colleague Annelle Sheline, one of the few public officials to resign over the U.S. government’s role in enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza. She is an inspiration to me, and will remain so. And Quincy deserves great credit for giving her a safe place to land and do her extraordinarily important work.

I am not so much leaving Quincy as building upon my work there to reach into parallel areas of work that are calling out to me, including mounting a more effective campaign to rein in the worst instincts of the military tech moguls and creating a more supportive environment for a younger, more diverse group of analysts, advocates, organizers, researchers and writers in the various movements for peace and social justice.

My younger colleagues inspire and sustain me. They are the main reason that I have the energy to keep fighting the good fight, even as I pass age 70. Thanks to what I have been learning from my younger colleagues, and from organizers on the front lines of fighting the injustices or our militarized society, I feel like I am just now getting a feel for how to put my skills to their best use in building a movement for genuine social change.

So on the one hand I will miss being at Quincy, but on the other I plan to keep working closely with my friends and colleagues there, so the distance may not ultimately be all that great.

On the other hand, transitions often prompt one to think about what works and what doesn’t in the fight to build a better world. Quincy is founded on two main principles – transpartisanship and restraint. Together they are a huge cut above the approaches of most other DC think tanks, many of which are compromised by the receipt of large infusions of cash from special interests, whether that means the Pentagon, weapons companies, or authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

But it is time to interrogate whether transpartisanship and restraint are adequate responses to the global emergency we face. There are voices and factions on the right that oppose endless war, but very few of them, if any at this point, are in the Trump administration, and principled conservative legislators like Thomas Massie are being driven out of the Republican Party — and in Massie’s case, out of Congress, in no small part due to a determined, well-funded smear campaign spearheaded by the Trump administration and its allies in AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

The real antiwar potential on the right comes not from elected or appointed officials, but from those in the MAGA base and other conservative factions who are sick of endless war and the colossal waste it entails. But reaching them and getting them to act effectively to blunt the worst instincts of the Trump administration is no easy matter.

As for restraint, it is too broad a concept to serve as a guide to the kind of deep rethinking and reshaping of U.S. foreign policy that is so desperately and urgently needed. It is largely about what not to do – don’t fight stupid wars, don’t build your foreign policy around a war machine run by profiteers and reckless ideologues, and talk to your adversaries in hopes of engaging in pragmatic diplomacy rather than open ended war and threats of war. That is a good start, but it doesn’t determine what shape diplomacy should take, or how to shore up non-military tools of statecraft, or how to build a culture of peace and people-to-people engagement as a tool for preventing conflict, or what kind of international economic and security institutions are best suited to keeping the peace and promoting our highest human potential at a time when power is diffused and the so-called “rules based international order” has been rendered a cruel joke by the genocide in Gaza and the persistent rule breaking and self-serving actions of the most powerful governments, corporations, and hyper-empowered individuals on the planet.

These shortcomings aren’t merely a function of a too narrow concept of restraint. No one has clear answers to them at this point. But the narrow rubric of restraint too often rules out exploring new ways of interacting at the global, regional, national, and interpersonal level that are essential if we are ever to build an enduring piece

A good case in point is Barry Posen’s well-regarded work on restraint, which is traditionalist in the extreme, suggesting that the key to global influence and stability revolves around the actions of the so-called great powers, and on who controls the Eurasian land mass. Human rights, nuclear abolition, citizen-to-citizen diplomacy, forging a new, more creative, more tolerant global culture, and reducing glaring global inequalities and persistent hypocrisy on the part of the governments of the great powers get insufficient attention in this view of what matters in global geopolitics. Restraint, properly conceived, means that governments need to stop doing stupid, criminal, self-serving things at the expense of the rest of us. But it’s not much of a guide to how to build the power to push back against the current forces of reaction, or to find new ways to govern communities, governments and the planet that put people first and value humanity over money, technology, and the exercise of raw power by the few.

So it’s not so much a problem with the concept of restraint as it is a challenge to crowd source a better way of resisting repression, encouraging participation, nurturing human potential, and removing the incentives that prefer war over diplomacy and confrontation over cooperation.

We have our work cut out for us. Thankfully, there are a lot of talented, principled people on the case.

But I needed a job. I had majored in philosophy on the theory that I would go to law school and become a legal aid lawyer. But midway through my senior year I took a trip (a psychedelic trip) and woke up the next day wondering if I really wanted to jump right back into school after spending more than half of my life in elementary, junior high, high school, and undergrad. So I went to talk to one of the deans of the college about my dilemma, and he essentially said there are plenty of lawyers, perhaps too many, and that I should go out into the world for a bit and come back to the idea of law school if I was so moved. I was never so moved.

So I went home at the Christmas holidays and my Mom, who was a member in good standing of the Buffalo branch of the International Typographical Union (ITU), taught me the official, professsional proofreading symbols. For about a year I worked at a series of small print shops, with the high points involving proofreading magazines like Modern Bride, Psychology Today, Skiing, Boating, and, for a while, US Magazine.

But then a friend of mine turned down a job at a think tank called the Council on Economic Priorities, working for the newly formed Conversion Information Center, which was designed to do research for communities seeking to reduce their economic dependency on Pentagon spending at a time — the late Carter administration — when it seemed like military spending might be going down. The project was the brainchild of Gordon Adams, a progressive economist/political scientist who was in midst of finishing his seminal book on the military-industrial complex, The Iron Triangle. You can listen to a 1981 interview with Gordon about the book here.

I interviewed for the job my friend turned down. Gordon and his colleague David Gold, who ran the Conversion Information Center, took a chance on me and hired me for the project. I was 24 years old, with a Bachelor’s in Philosophy from Columbia. My only relevant experience involved researching corporations that were propping up the apartheid regime in South Africa, first as a student activist and then as a volunteer member of the collective that put out Southern Africa magazine. I also took Seymour Melman’s undergraduate course on the Permanent War Economy of the United States.

In contrast to my rather thin resume, at my current job in the Democratizing Foreign Policy Program of the Quincy Institute, we received 400 applications for two intern slots in our most recent hiring round. Many of them had Master’s degrees and had published in popular outlets. If I came along with the resume I had when I applied to work with Gordon and David back in 1979 to apply to work at my current place today, I would not even get an interview. I owe my career in my chosen field in signficant part on their willingness to take a chance on a bright, underexperienced 24 year old back in 1979.

Late in life Gordon made a transition, and is now Abby Ross. Abby has had a rich life, personally and professionally, which I can share more about in future posts. They have a Substack, The Sheathed Sword, which is a delight to read, even in, or maybe especially in, these dangerous times. Their most recent entry, “Universal Change,” was especially meaningful to me. You should read it at the link in the prior sentence. Among the things Abby says in the piece are the following:

“I am a non-dualist – the world view that preceded Copernicus and Descartes – the lightning rods of science and logical, rational thinking.

Somewhere I came across this quote from Ervin Laszlo, an amazing philosopher of science:

At the cutting edge of contemporary science a remarkable insight is surfacing: The universe, with all things in it, is a quasi-living, coherent whole. All things in it are connected. . . . A cosmos that is connected, coherent and whole recalls an ancient notion that was present in the tradition of every civilization: It is an enchanted cosmos. . . . We are part of each other and of nature. We are a conscious part of the world, a being through which the cosmos comes to know itself. . . . We are at home in the universe.

Richard Tarnas writes in Cosmos and Psyche about how we are leaving the age of logic, science, and material thinking – and entering a new, entirely difference paradigm. To Laszlo’s conception, Tarnas adds the importance of knowing how the universe moves and changes, and the Jungian awareness of the power of archetypes in that universe.

Or, to come to a Buddhist concept, the world is evolving toward a non-dualistic state, where we can become conscious that we are not separate from each other, nor from the many species and living things that populate this earth.

Dualistic thinking brought great progress; it is reaching its limits with the simultaneous destruction of the planet on which we live. In its current form, the Copernican/Cartesian world has brought great productivity and, today, extremes of wealth and impoverishment.”

Nourishing food for thought, as always . . . Subscribe to The Sheathed Sword for more of same. And my eternal gratitude goes to Abby for getting me started on the path that has led to where I am today.

We lived at 119 South Bend Lane, which was part of what was supposed to be a “luxury” community called Lakecrest Gardens. It was supposed to be built around a central area with a central area with swimming pools and a playground, but the developer went bankrupt before they were built. So we were built around an open field, which was actually better for me and my friends growing up. There was a pond with tadpoles and frogs, and a few bushes to hide behind if you wanted to sneak a cigarette. I tried my first cigarette when I was eleven. I inhaled wrong and coughed my brains out. I never smoked again, unless you count pot, but I plead the Fifth on that question.

The big attraction on my block was access to the beach. The beach was on Lake Erie, and it was only a few hundred yards from my house. You had to get down a 40-foot cliff to get to the beach. Our neighbor used to dig stairs into the soft rock/dirt of the cliff every spring. The cliff was full of embedded fossils, which we collected in mass quantities as kids. Our stairs to the beach let out near a big boulder we called Mother’s Rock. I don’t know who named it. It was a few feet into the water, and it was large enough that you had to climb up to get on top of it. It was large enough that if you climbed up, a couple of us could stretch out and sun bathe on top of it.

Up until I was eight or so, the lake water appeared to be fairly pristine. If I went up to my neck I could see my toes through the clear water. When we got to be ten or so we used to spear fish in the lake. It was gross. You would basically walk up to a catfish or a carp (which looked like a giant discolored gold fish) and jab it in the side with a spear that had a handle the size of a rake’s handle. The catfish and carp were SLOW, and usually didn’t even try to escape. It wasn’t a sport. It was a massacre.

Our beach fun was interrupted when I was 11 or 12 (don’t quote me on the exact year), when huge numbers of dead fish landed on shore, carpeting the sand. I didn’t swim in Lake Erie again for 20 years or so, after they took the phosphates out of detergent and most of the area’s steel and auto plants shut down. You can swim in Lake Erie now, but I can’t see my toes when I’m up to my chest, like I could when I was a kid.

In the years that the lake was unswimmable there were some weird side effects. Some unlucky families had invested in mansions on the shore of the lake, with their own stairs to get down the cliff. When people stopped going down there – other than those of us who enjoyed the dystopian beachfront – one of the families let their stairs down to the beach atrophy, to the point where they went halfway down the cliff and stopped.

One of the big sources of pollution of Lake Erie in our area was the Bethlehem Steel Plant, which at its peak employed about 25,000 people at a facility that straddled the main road to Buffalo from Lake View, Route 5, with one half of the property emptying toxins right into the lake. My brother John, a lost soul who died from drinking at age 49, worked at Bethlehem Steel after he dropped out of college in his last semester of an engineering program at Clarkson College in Potsdam, New York. He worked in the coke ovens, the dirtiest job in the plant. He used to come home coated with smoke and dust, as if he had just emerged from a coal mine. It was all down hill for John from there. He had an industrial accident at another factory – Snyder Tank – and he never worked again after about age 25, living on welfare in a tough neighborhood of Buffalo and then living with my Mom in our childhood home in the last years of his life.

My first memory is of crawling on the beach at our family’s summer house on Lake Erie, which we sold after we moved to Lake View. I was probably between two and three years old.

We had good times on the lake. Water skiing, hanging out at the Town Beach, playing football up the hill from the beachfront, meeting girls, sneaking down to the beach with a few beers when we were teenagers, and so forth. In the winter the lake used to freeze solid. People would drive their cars out on the lake and dig holes for ice fishing. The lake doesn’t freeze hard enough to do that any more. But there’s a naval park in downtown Buffalo that rents big bike-like floats that let you pedal as you cruise through the water. And Crystal Beach, a shore community on the Canadian side of the lake, has revived, with folks buying summer houses there.

That was then, and this is now . . .

One of many revelations on the tour was that Samuel Fraunces, the owner of the historic Fraunces Tavern, where George Washington and his troops celebrated the end of the revolutionary war on December 4, 1783, may have been black, but passing as white. If so he was taking a huge risk. If he was in fact trying to pass, and had been caught, he could have been executed. It appears that, like Alexander Hamilton of Broadway musical fame, Fraunces was born in the West Indies, likely in Barbados. The question of whether he was black or white has been long disputed and never definitively resolved, BUT . . .

If Alexander Hamilton can be portrayed as a plucky underdog against a backdrop of a multiracial cast in a story of how he worked his way into the elite of the American governing class as an orphan migrant from the West Indies, why not a musical about Samuel Fraunces, who for some went by the nickname “Black Sam”?

One way at it would be to run with the idea that Fraunces was in fact passing as white, and how risky that was, perhaps with family members threatening to expose him, and extorting him for money in the process. Or there could be a version where an intrepid researcher of a later generation sets out to settle once and for all whether Fraunces was black or white, with flashback’s to to Revolutionary War and its aftermath bearing out the researcher’s findings and conclusions.

It’s true, Fraunces is no Hamilton in terms of visibility, and there is no big Ron Chernow-style biography to work off of. But I to paraphrase Lin Manuel Miranda, why throw away “our shot”? Cue to the tune from Hamilton.

Richard Pryor is high on my list of favorite American comics, along with others of his era and before like George Carlin, Robert Klein, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Tom Lehrer; later generations like Robin Williams, Lenny Bruce, Elaine Boosler, Paula Poundstone, and Stephen Wright; and current performers like Tig Notaro, Negin Farsad, Hari Kondabolu, and Gary Gulman. Because of his versatility, his honesty, and his amazing rise from challenging circumstances, Pryor stands apart.

As the film recounts, Richard Pryor was born in a brothel in Peoria, Illinois. His mother was a sex worker, and his grandmother, who raised him, ran several houses of prostitution (apologies if that is too old school a phrase). And his dad was an enforcer/security person at one of the establishments.

Pryor wanted none of this to be known when he started out in comedy. The documentary shows a clip of a routine in which he makes up an origin story that involves growing up in a multicultural, multi-religious housing project. Pyror’s early aim was to be like Bill Cosby, who deemphasized racial issues in his act and came across as a clean cut, non-threatening joke teller with no rough edges or hidden history (which sadly, in Cosby’s case, ultimately proved to be a colossal lie when it came to how he conducted himself offstage).

Following the Cosby performing model ultimately failed for Richard Pryor for a number of reasons. For one, Pryor felt inauthentic playing that part. For another, as he got into drugs of all sorts, the clean cut “brand” was no longer an option. The film recounts the story of a time when Pryor was doing a high end gig, possibly in Vegas, to an all-white or near all-white audience, when he literally walked off stage in discomfort at playing that role.

As he evolved, Pryor started talking about his actual life history in his act, and he reached for material that was deeper and edgier. Offstage he hung out with black radicals. There’s even a scene of Pryor performing where he nods to Huey Newton of the Black Panthers, who was in the audience that night.

Pryor wanted to tell his truth, but he did NOT want to be the voice of Black America, or of the Black freedom struggle.

The film interviews people from all aspects of Pryor’s life, as well as those he has inspired: Tiffany Haddish, Lily Tomlin, Mike Epps, Howie Mandel, Jennifer Lee (his companion and spouse in his later years), as well as managers and directors who were involved with his films and a short-lived TV series. The breadth of Pryor’s career is amazing – from his Cosby-esque years to his later, let-it-all-hang-out live shows, to films that he starred in or wrote that ranged from comedies like Stir Crazy (with Gene Wilder, directed by Sidney Poitier) and Blazing Saddles (which he co-wrote, and was Mel Brooks’ first choice as star of, before they settled on Cleavon Little), serious films like Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar (playing an auto worker alongside Yaphet Kotto and Harvey Keitel), and the autobiographical movie Jo Jo Dancer Your Life is Calling.

The film doesn’t pull punches about Pryor’s drug problems (including the time he set himself on fire free-basing cocaine) or his illness (his 1986 diagnosis with multiple sclerorisis). But it puts those challenges in the context of his entire, remarkable life and career, and does not sensationalize them or use them to narrowly define who Pryor was or what he meant to our culture.

“I Am Richard Pryor” is well worth watching at a time when the MAGA crowd is trying to sanitize our culture and our society in an effort to make America a bastion of white privilege and white preferences. But there will no be no return to a lily white America that never truly existed except in the minds of the prejudiced and the exemplars of white supremacy. Diverse cultural expression and genuine history may be temporarily driven out of mainstream institutions, but those expressions and that history will be disseminated one way or another, to the benefit of all as we try to redeem and renew our culture, our society, and our democracy.

The first problem is that the history of America is maddeningly complicated. On the one hand, our rather imperfect “founders” – the vast majority of whom were slaveowners who were opposed to women’s suffrage and biased towards their fellow property owners – crafted some lovely rhetoric about freedom from oppression, self-government, and democracy that we have yet to live up to as a nation.

We are a nation of immigrants, without whom America would be duller, less powerful, less creative, less inventive, less prosperous, and more poorly educated and culturally sterile. But we are also a nation built on the foundations of slavery and genocide.

The phrase “the home of the free and the brave” is cruelly incomplete, an exercise in wish fulfillment by engaged in by folks who are either unwilling or unable to deal with the darker side of our history.

On the other hand, despite the very real, very deep, and very painful realities that have marred the history of America, there are many positives in the American experience. Immigrants – whether in business, the arts, the labor movement, the sciences, or virtually any other aspect of our collective reality – have built a vibrant, diverse culture that is the envy of the world, despite all of the very real obstacles grounded in racism, relanigious bigotry, misogyny, anti-gay and anti-trans discrimination, and more.

Native Americans have kept their culture and their ancestral values alive despite the genocide that has occurred, as can be seen in any number of places, including the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico or the “House Made of Dawn” Native American art exhibit currently on view at the New York Historical Society (know simply known as “New York Historical.”)

Even as the Trump administration uses its campaign against DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) as a thinly veiled instrument for bringing back unrepentant bigotry of all sorts, political and cultural figures of all religions, backgrounds, and gender identities continue to resist repression and envision and fight for a far more enlightened and inspiring future for the people of this nation and this planet.

In the war of the robots, grifters, bigots, narcissists, and profiteers against those of us who cherish relationships with other human beings first and foremost, the humanists will prevail. But it could be a close-run affair, and we have no time to waste.

As an antidote to the faux triumphalism of the Trumpers and the hate-mongering of imperial lap dog and ex-Fox news host Pete Hegseth, I highly recommend the latest episode of NPR’s On the Media, which features an interview with the indispensable analyst and modern day prophet Eddie Glaude about his new book America U.S.A.: How Race Shadows America’s Anniversaries.

And if you despair of a future lived online and onscreen, playing video games, watching tik tok and Youtube videos, and glued to your phone like an addict bouncing from one drug fix to the next, check out the “Summer of Ludd” in New York City from June 28th to July 5th. It’s part of the neo-Luddite Renaissance (well described in this great Nation piece by John Nichols). The center of the action will be in Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood.

The best way to take in the Summer of Ludd festival is to show up at the park, see what’s happening on stage, and pick up a printed guide to the week’s events. It’s a gentle, human-centered cultural revolution in the making, and we desperately need it NOW.

I will be a speaker at the “Luddite Conference on Participatory Futures,” which will be held at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium at 63 Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village this coming Tuesday, June 30th from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The conference will be followed by a March to an office of tech giant and profiteer of repression Palantir, whose technology has been used to do everything from accelerate the bombing in Gaza to finding and targeting protesters who have been harassed, injured, and even murdered in cold blood by ICE agents on the streets of America.

If you want an even deeper experience of America’s true history take the “NYC Slavery and Underground Railroad Walking Tour,” a two and one-half hour affair that is incredibly informative, and, for me at least, very hopeful. It charts how slavery enriched New Yorkers, from the titans of Wall Street on down, but also how New York gave birth to the global anti-slavery movement. A group of us did the tour this morning as part of a weekend of celebrations for a friend who just turned 70. Our guide, Sean O’Brien, was awesome. I had a rough sense of some of the issues under discussion, but I learned so much in the two and a half hours of the walk that my head is spinning with ideas and new connections. It is a must for anyone feeling down about the state of our country and our world at this crucial moment in our history.

So don’t buy the hype or swallow the official U.S. government bullsh*t about America at 250. There are better ways to mark the occasion, and better ways to prepare ourselves for the fights to come, both the fight to wrest control of our nation and our world from techno-fascism and the fight to build a world far more tolerant, just, humane, hopeful and nurturing than anything the current leadership of the Democratic party or the leaders of any current government on this planet can imagine, much less deliver. The future is in our hands, and we have plenty of role models and hardworking organizations and individuals to look to for help and to work with in unison in quest to rescue humanity from its current deadly path.

I will be doing a multi-part review of work on the issue. I will not attempt to be comprehensive, or to go deep on each book or paper, but rather to review the range of analyses out there and give readers the option of going deeper on any of them should they so choose.

My inquiries began when I was an undergraduate at Columbia University (September 1973 to January 1978), first through my involvement in the South Africa/anti-apartheid divestment movement on campus, and, to a lesser degree, through my coursework.

My formative research and writing came when I was part of the collective that published Southern Africa magazine, where I wrote about companies like Space Research, which had a factory in Vermont that straddled the U.S.-Canada border. Space Research was founded by Gerald Bull, a Canadian scientist and University of Toronto graduate (with a PhD from the university’s Institute of Aerophysics, class of 1951). Bull died in March 1990 in a Brussels hotel, assassinated for his efforts to help Saddam Hussein build a “super gun” – an artillery piece meant to be able to launch an artillery piece from Iraqi soil that could reach Israel.

The story of Bull’s efforts to aid Saddam Hussein, and, prior to that, the South African apartheid regime, is well told in James Adams’ 1992 book, Bull’s Eye: The Assassination and Life of Supergun Inventor Gerald Bull. I picked up Bull’s story in the mid-1970s, before his dalliance with Saddam Hussein, when his main hope for a big payday was building a supergun and selling it to the apartheid regime. Most of what I learned about Bull, and wrote about in my article for Southern Africa, came from following the intrepid reporting on his firm Space Research by reporters for the Vermont-based Burlington Free Press.

Bull received some funding in the early days of the company from the Army and the CIA, and his first foreign customer was, ironically, given his later work for Saddam Hussein, Israel, which bought artillery shells from Space Research for use in the 1973 Arab/Israeli war. As one of the Burlington Free Press reporters who broke the Space Research story, Sam Hemingway, notes in a documentary on the topic produced for the podcast Brave Little State, after Israel “Along came South Africa . . . they were willing to pay a premium for what was really a black market product.”

The work of the Vermont reporters was aided by an investigation carried out by a customs agent named Larry Curtis, who eventually gathered enough evidence to warrant a federal indictment of Bull’s company. Curtis believes his investigation was curtailed at the behest of the Nixon White House, well before he could bring all of the responsible parties to justice.

That was basically the story I told in the pages of Southern Africa. I also wrote about South Africa’s quest for a synthetic fuel plant, Sasol, that turns coal into gasoline. Sasol has a headquarters in Houston and major facilities in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Its original purpose was to help the apartheid regime weather an oil embargo by developing the capability to turn coal, which it possessed in large quantities, into oil.

Meanwhile, on the academic side, I did a long paper for Prof. Marcia Wright’s class on the history of the colonization of South Africa about the Anglo-American Corporation, a South Africa-based firm that produced both diamonds and gold. It was one of the world’s first multinational corporations.

As in the case of the Burlington Free Press and Space Research, local reporters often break stories of global significance. That was the case in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in the mid-1980s, when local reporters helped uncover a scheme by which a local firm, International Signal and Control (ISC), which was charged in January 1991 with colluding with South Africa’s government-owned armaments company Armscor to illegally ship “U.S.-built weapons and technology to South Africa, including artillery fuses later sent on to Iraq and used against U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf War.” The story was picked up nationally, and then globally, and led to the indictment of ISC CEO James Guerin.

Getting back to the mid-1970s and my undergraduate studies at Columbia, my most important academic influence was Seymour Melman’s course on The Permanent War Economy, named after his book of the same title.

Melman had a unique perspective. He was an engineering professor, and he noted that the cost-plus, money-is-no-object habits of major U.S. arms companies had produced a large cohort of engineers who could not design machines with any concern for cost. The military-industrial sector was a drag on the civilian economy, opening the way for nations that spent less on their militaries and more on civilian R&D, like Germany and Japan, to make major inroads into civilian product markets formerly dominated by the United States. Melman’s pioneering work has been further developed by his colleague Lloyd “Jeff” Dumas, and in Miriam Pemberton’s recent book, Six Stops on the National Security Tour: Rethinking Warfare Economies, which I will discuss in a future post.

That’s all for now. There’s more to be said about Melman and his successors, and I will get to that later in this series. In my next post, I’ll talk about my first think tank stint, at the Council on Economic Priorities (1979 to 1985), and how it exposed me to additional researchers and writers on the topic of the economics of military spending, most notably Gordon Adams (now Abby Ross), whose book The Iron Triangle took an in depth look at the military-industrial complex, 20 years after Eisenhower first warned of its dangers. It is still essential reading.