Inconceivable

Fezzini: "Inconceivable!"

Montoya: "You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means."

-The Princess Bride

If you only know Wallace Shawn from My Dinner with Andre, I'm so sorry.  If you only know Mandy Patinkin from Criminal Minds, well shame on you.  Rob Reiner's masterwork The Princess Bride is so very necessary for a lot of reasons. Shawn's portrayal of Fezzini, a self styled mastermind who is never quite as smart as he thinks he is, and Patinkin's Inigo Montoya, revenge obsessed, oft besotted master swordsman, not to mention Andre the Giant as Fezzig, rhyme loving strongman, give us so many memorable moments in the movie's first act.  Outside of Yoda's Star Wars dialogue, there is probably not much in the world of cinema that can be both very serious and seriously funny at the same time.

Fezzini's repetition of the word inconceivable is a running gag.  As mastermind and his two thugs execute a kidnapping that is supposed to go off without a hitch, they are pursued by the Man in Black who turns out to be the hero of the film.  Fezzini has built in several fail-safe features in his plan, and none of them turn out to be actually fail-safe.  Each time they do actually fail, he says, "Inconceivable!" Finally Inigo says that famous line, "You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means."

Misapprehension of what words mean is a rampant problem among humans in general, it can lead to everything from a simple misunderstanding to an actual war.  Lately,  have noticed that the political world, where words have been notoriously abused and misused pretty much forever, has been using words to start trying to break apart something that most of us are going to really regret losing if they succeed.

I know budgets and tax codes can be confusing.  I often feel a little like Fezzig and Inigo when the Fezzinis of the world get going on their wonky explanations of thing, but there a few things that I have noticed over the years that are sort of unavoidable truths about our government.  The first is that it is conceptually a lot easier to figure out where the money goes than you might have been led to believe.  There are just three wedges of the pie chart that make up almost 75% of federal spending (both mandatory and discretionary): 

That big blue wedge that is labeled "Health" is essentially Medicare and Medicaid.  To be honest, the numbers that are entailed by even the little wedges can be mind boggling to ordinary folk but the big picture tells you that if we're going to make a major impact on our government spending something is going to have to happen to the big three.  No politician in their right mind will ever recommend cutting defense spending, the closest they ever come is to maybe try and go after wasteful uses of that 16% of the spending, like the billions of dollars poured into a notoriously disastrous fighter plane in an era when the military themselves say the last thing they need is more fighter planes, or the fact that we buy thousands of tanks that we do not need because the manufacture of said tanks is good for enough representative's home districts.

For a while now, certain conservative types have been talking about the need to reform "entitlements" and end the "Welfare State." Both of these words might resonate strongly in the minds of folks who are "tired of footing the bill for people who don't want to work for a living."  As wrongheaded and frankly cruel as the whole "welfare queen," narratives were, there are a good number of people who believed and still thoroughly hold to that idea, that the bulk of our budget problem is people gaming the system, when in fact there is no such reality.  "The Welfare State," is in fact the blue and the red wedges together.

If you know anything about Social Security, you will know that it has it's own way of collecting money.  In years when I was poor enough to have no income tax liability, I still had to pay into the SS system.  It was actually kind of a shock the first year I was employed as a minister, I did my tax return on my fairly modest starting salary, and momentarily I thought I was going to get a $5000 refund, because we just had a child before the end of 2003 and thus had very little income tax liability.  Then I found out that I also have to fill out a schedule SE because Social Security considers clergy self employed, so basically, I watched $5K evaporate from my dreams to pay for Social Security.

This is the reality for almost all of the working class and most of the middle class: Social Security is always going to get theirs.  The hope is though, that when you retire, you will live long enough to get some return on that investment.  Social Security is not, in fact, welfare, it is something you pay for when you're young so that you will have some form of income when you are old.  It's not exactly a savings account though, and the Gubmint has a way of playing shenanigans with this huge chunk of cash.  They have done things that ought not to have been done, like borrowing money from it and floating bonds against it and kicking the can of fiscal responsibility down the road.

Remember this is money that you have paid out of probably every paycheck of your adult life, and it is supposed to be there for you when you age out of the working population or are put out by some disability.  If some political genius starts trying to sell you entitlement reform that includes robbing you of social security, I suggest throwing them off the cliffs of insanity before they lead you any further along in this farce.

I get that we can have disagreements about what the government should and should not do, and I am honestly not always of the opinion that the government should be bigger and more intrusive into our lives, but the thing about SSI is that most of us have already paid quite a lot into the upfront cost of it, with the good faith expectation that it was an investment in our future and in the interest of our nation.  To violate that expectation is not, by definition, reform, it is robbery.

Of Empires

We are about a week away from the latest installment of the Star Wars saga.  Over the past several years this occurrence has helped me remember the excitement of Christmas, in a purely non-spiritual sense.  I mean the waiting for something that I really wanted part, not the birth of Jesus part.  Sometimes I am jazzed about what comes about in a galaxy far far away, other times... well let's just say by the time Obi Wan left Anakin smoldering by the lava river of Mustafar I was pretty much in favor of that whiny little ingrate turning into the Darth Vader that was both cool and terrifying to 10 year old me.  If you don't know what any of that means, bear with me a second, because this isn't primarily about Star Wars, and I'm going to get on with it.
The thing that I think makes Star Wars stories compelling is not the Force, or Lightsabers, definitely not the Jedi, it probably isn't even Han Solo and Chewbacca, it is the presence of the Empire, or in the latest installations the First Order.  The narrative of the Galactic Empire gives real zing to the stories, because it connects them to real stuff in a way that Ewoks definitely do not.  Say what you want about the prequels, but seeing a fictional account of people choosing security over freedom and making deals with Dark Lords to secure power, rings pretty real in 21st century America.
Because let's face it, at the moment we're the only thing that honestly passes for an Empire on our planet, which given the absence of hyper-drives is pretty much what we're stuck with for now. People other than myself have undertaken the thought experiment (a fun thing to do with fictional narratives) of putting the Star Wars shoe on the other foot.  What if Luke Skywalker is a terrorist?  Because blowing up a space station (two actually) with thousands of people on board, only two of which appear patently evil is a pretty terrorist thing to do.  Did you ever wonder who those Stormtroopers were under the helmets?  Did they have families?  Were they clones? Or, even if they were clones, is it really ethical to create sentient beings for the sole purpose of war?  What about all the non-combat personnel that must have inhabited those enormous mechanical planets?
You get the idea, as Obi Wan Kenobi said, "many of the truths we cling to depend largely on our point of view."  I have been thinking a lot lately about how the rest of the people on our planet are looking at the good old U.S.A. lately.  And, no, it's not just because of Trump, I actually think I first started this during the Clinton administration, and did it quite a bit during the G.W. Bush years as we kept tearing off into new wars every six months or so.  Even during the Obama years, where I was proud of having a grown up president, and finally breaking the white guy monopoly on the chief executive, I had questions about our use of drones and the ethics of being able to kill so terribly efficiently with no skin in the game, it seemed awfully like the kind of thing the sinister Trade Federation did with its droid army.
It's a peculiar place for our country to be honestly.  After all we have this foundation story of a rag-tag group of colonists who rebelled against the great and glorious British Empire.  Who would have known that two hundred years later we would be acting as a defacto colonial power with our military apparatus in every corner of the globe and our economic and cultural influence dominant even where we don't have guns and bombs.  We also have the threat of a planet killing arsenal of nuclear weapons at our disposal. It seems sort of false to pretend like we are the underdog in any fight at the moment, but that doesn't stop us from trying.  We may have a serious challenger in China, but I sort of doubt that they would ever try and assume the role of world policeman, even if they do dethrone our economic hegemony.
Empires never manage to be entirely benevolent to those they rule.  In non-fictional worlds though, they are rarely as monolithic and sinister as we try and make them.  Nuances in the behavior of Empires though rarely matter to those on the receiving end of their inevitable brutality.  I don't reckon that the people Rome habitually crucified really had much appreciation for their roads and aqueducts or their experiment with democracy.  Likewise, I doubt an Afghani who had to bury a couple children in pieces thanks to our bombs, will really much appreciate our high ideals of liberty and justice for all.
The scariest parts of Star Wars, are those places where the Sith start to make sense, because then I realize how seductive the Dark Side can really be.  It scares me when I buy the justifications of our Empire hook line and sinker, without trying to comprehend the human cost of our power and might. I don't want to do that, because I am trying to follow a man who rejected the lure of empire and power to an extreme degree.  I want to follow the example of grace and peace rather than violence and power.  So I ask myself, since I'm pretty surely part of the Empire, what does it mean to work for the rebellion from within?  What sort of stand breaks the cycles of violence?  What force needs to be used to resist the dominion that we have a hard time even acknowledging we have?

A Toddler with a Hammer

Now if there's one thing we do worse than any other nation,

it is try and manage someone else's affairs.

-Will Rogers

Jerusalem.  Everybody knows it's the capitol of Israel, except for the fact that it probably shouldn't be, for an awful heap of reasons.  The Trump today took another one of his signature dumps in the middle of our collective living room carpet by declaring that we would recognize Jerusalem, instead of Tel Aviv (a perfectly good capitol city city) as the capitol of the nation state of Israel.  I do not doubt that this is the sort of thing that the Donald does to appease a lot of those "evangelicals" who mysteriously support his serial fornication, outright mendacity and shameful braggadocio. See there's this sort of nut-job fringe among the fundamentalist types that subscribes to Zionism, not because they really love the Jewish people or the State of Israel, but because they believe that, somehow someway, the on-going catastrophe that is happening in the Middle East is going to lead to an apocalyptic final struggle between God and the Devil and Jesus is going to come back.

Historically speaking there is a plain in northern Israel near the town of Meggido that, if you look at the lay of the land, is kind of a good spot to stage an all out slobberknocker of a battle for all the marbles, I mean at least if you're fighting with chariots and ranks of spear wielding Philistines.  The place is called Har Meggido, which you can see might be rather conveniently morphed into Armageddon.  If we had only had the good sense to follow the advice of several early church fathers and left the Apocalypse of John out of the canon of the Bible, we might never have noticed that the decisive battle between good and evil is "supposed" to take place in that fragile little finger of land that God promised to Abraham and his descendants.  But because we left all that stuff in there, because we just love riders of the apocalypse and great whores and seven headed dragons (generally dragons improve just about any story), we now have a bunch of people who want to take it literally.  That happens when you let any story sit around long enough.

So now we have a very real problem, the world's two biggest religions and one of the world's most determined ethnic groups now consider Jerusalem to be sacred.  Christians consider Jerusalem sacred because of the Jewishness of Jesus and the fact that he was killed (and resurrected) there.  Muslims have the Dome of the Rock there, which while it's not exactly Mecca is still pretty important to them.  And the Jews, well it is after all David's city, since he kicked out the Jebusites fair and square.  But the thing is, the Jewish claim is only partly about religion, sure they have the temple mount and the western wall and all that, but to conflate political Zionism with religious Judaism does a disservice to Judaism as a faith and I think also to Jewish people as a whole.

Anyway Jerusalem is more complicated than any of us really comprehend, least of all Donald J. Trump, but he gets his advice from sinister types like Mike Pence who is definitely the kind of millennialist nut-job who wants it all to go boom so Jesus can finally take the wheel.  As you probably can guess I do not subscribe to that point of view, but today I'm going to pray for Jerusalem particularly, because we may have just thrown a match on a some gunpowder.

Learning from Mistakes

The only thing that is smarter than learning from your own mistakes is learning from the ones others make before you.  The advancement of society depends upon it. Over the past several years the GOP has steadfastly exploited a mistake made over two decades ago by their opposition.  But exploiting that failure in others is a different tool than learning from it.  The mistake I'm talking about is none other than William Jefferson Clinton.  The Democratic party, after two terms of Reagan and one term of George Bush the elder, after watching Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis FAIL to win the hearts and minds of the American people, saw Slick Willy with his Saxophone and his teflon coating as a renaissance of the JFK era.  I remember this because it was the first election in which I was old enough to vote.
People who paid attention knew that Billy-boy had some baggage, Paula Jones and Jennifer Flowers were out there, and Whitewater. But he seemed so perfect a totem for the ascendancy of the Baby Boomers, finally taking the reigns from the "Greatest Generation."  Sure he didn't have the military background the GHW Bush had, but he could be the Democratic version of Ronald Reagan if not the second coming of JFK.  So the Democrats, who had pretty much given up on the religious right and the moral majority ever voting blue again, decided to hitch their wagons to a man they knew had moral failings, but who had political gifts.  They sold whatever conscience they had in order to win.
I'm not talking political ideals here at all, I'm talking personalities, because I am beginning to suspect that, in the years I have been voting, it is personality and not ideology that wins these things.
Caveat Emptor: The Democrats got 16 years of not being able to pretend to have a moral bone in their body, ceding the high ground on any question of principle to an opposition who honestly had no better right to claim it than they did.  I thought that perhaps the Obama Presidency, eight years of what now seems a blissful, scandal free administration led by a man that reasonable people were almost forced to admire for his composure and decorum if not his policy, might finally lift the Dems out of the moral dumpster fire of Mr. "I did not have sex with that woman."
Then they ran Hillary, who for all her qualifications is still, for some reason, a Clinton.  I thought that maybe, despite all good sense, perhaps the Republicans were actually moral enough to reject Trump, con man extraordinaire, and they probably would have been against almost anyone else besides a Clinton.  I know, people try to say it was more complicated than that, maybe it was the fact that she was a woman, maybe it was Comey, maybe it was Benghazi, the emails, whatever, but most of the people I know who voted for Trump did it with their noses held and voted against Clinton.
People remember things longer than we generally acknowledge and having the President of the United States of America make a mockery of your whole system (moral, legal and ethical) stings pretty bad. So what better way to take revenge on the Clinton machine than by electing a Republican version of him over his wife.  I really do think that Trump is a lot like Bill Clinton, with the added frosting of political incompetence and borderline mental stability.  Both of them probably deserve to be impeached at some point (Bill survived his, Trump might too).
The thing is though, while we are paying attention to the orange haired ignoramus, political stuff is happening that's going to really hurt our country.  We are ceding our nation to oligarchs and plutocrats and engaging in the worst sort of identity politics.  Charles Grassley and Orrin Hatch, both long term fixtures in the US Congress made statements over the past several days that absolutely personify the worst stereotypes of heartless right-wing snobbery. This sort of blatant, haughty, disdain for poor and working class people reveals that the GOP doesn't fully understand the populist sentiment that inflicted Trump upon them (and us).  The fact that Trump is about as populist as Andrew Carnegie is irrelevant, the people who voted for him did so out of a very populist sentiment and it is not one of the better angels of populism either.  The reason why Donald J Trump still holds an approval rating even in the 30s is because he continues to be inflammatory. And what a lot of people wanted from Trump was to simply have him break stuff. I think we need to understand that a good portion of Trump voters would like Mitch McConnell and Orrin Hatch to get hoisted by their own petard as much as they would enjoy Chuck Shumer and Nancy Pelosi getting tarred and feathered. Because large numbers of people simply hate Washington D.C. and assume that all politicians are crooked, bottom-feeders, and they have ample reason for that; Bill Clinton was the head hyena, and as we are finding out now, he had quite a pack of fellow predatory scavengers.
Bill Clinton had his famous, "it's the economy stupid" line about how he was managing to remain popular despite scandals.  The current day administration ought to know though that their plutocratic policies are going to be like gasoline on a fire of outrage if they don't work. If the people who believe in what the Trump sold them wake up to find that they have actually been betrayed into the hands of robber barons, they are not going to be happy with you, and thanks to the interweb, your Mr. Burns imitations are now out there, so that everyone can witness your own little "let them eat cake moment." One commentator referred to it as "riding a hungry tiger," good luck when the tiger notices that you are moist and delicious.
I can't say I'm happy about the prospect of things going sideways and south, schadenfreude only goes so far, I live in this country too.

Unsettling Dialogue (part 3)

We have been wrong to believe that competition invariably results in the triumph of the best.

Divided, body and soul, man and woman, producer and consumer, nature and technology, city and country are thrown into competition with one another. And none of these competitions is ever resolved in the triumph of one competitor, but only in the exhaustion of both.

For our healing we have on our side one great force: the power of Creation, 

with good care, with kindly use, to heal itself.

-Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

What if I told you that the most important Biblical concept outside of: Love God, Love each other, is that we ought to live within boundaries; would you believe me?  I know it sounds heretical to various sorts of people; people who believe that God is like a super-blessing machine that just wants to give you everything you ever wanted; also people who believe that God wants us to keep on filling the earth and subduing it, and even people who believe that God is cheering us on past every obstacle we face in the world.  What if I told you that God is a big fan of limits and boundaries and absolutely a fan of the word "enough?" And it's not because God is a big cosmic killjoy either, it's because God knows, better than any of us ever will, how Creation works.

In the past week certain clergy from around the country have been protesting what the GOP is calling "Tax Reform" with the tag #2000verses, which of course means 2000 verses of Scripture.  What the 2000 verses refer to are verses from Genesis to Revelation that exhort us to care for the poor.  There is a remarkable amount of material that is founded on a simple idea that was put out in the laws of Leviticus 19: 9-10:

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest.  You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes from your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien; I am the Lord your God.

This section of Leviticus has lots of fun rules in it, some of which we absolutely disregard, and some of which we like to hold on to in a highly selective manner, but the thing about how you treat others that is defined here rises up out of the random commandments about types of cloth, haircuts and tattoos and gets enshrined in the words of the Psalms, the Prophets and Jesus the Christ.  What is being reflected in the Law is the Creation concept of margins.  Margins are the "solution" that Berry offers up to many of the woes that afflict us, and I have to say I rather strongly agree.  Giving yourself and your neighbors room to breath, and some cushion from calamity.  Living within a set of boundaries where you are not constantly "up against it," isn't that what many of us would define as happiness?
Most of us live our lives in search of that goal, to have enough, to have a home, and a certain number of material things, to have a job that gives us access to those material things but also allows us some "free time." This is not a modern materialist invention, but rather the goal of human endeavor from the beginning of time, even back in the early days of hunter gatherer human society, before books, and even before agriculture, humans took time to paint things in caves and carve things into rocks, these were not necessary endeavors, they were "marginal" activities, things done in the extra space and time life provided.
Tribal societies, where life could be decidedly brutish and short, developed traditions of storytelling that were as important to their identity as passing on practical knowledge about how to hunt and make tools. I think it is fair to say that a fulfilling human life must be about more than just survival.  Margins provide us with that capability, and in a complete understanding of the Scriptures you will notice that margins are supposed to be for everyone, not just the lucky few.  Whether it is the legal codes about gleanings, or prophecies of woe to those who allow their greed to afflict the world, or Jesus telling Martha that Mary did the right thing by just sitting and listening instead of being busily efficient, margins are a big deal in the Word.
If your theology doesn't deal with margins and if your ethical practice idolizes efficiency over compassion, you are not living according to the Word.  Notice too, that these laws were not just challenges for individuals, they were codified into a set of practices that were meant to shape a community.  The prophets are pretty clear that the king was supposed to play by these rules as well as the common shepherds, thus when we shape our societies, it would behoove us to consider margins, not maximum efficiency.
This is a fatal flaw in unmitigated capitalism.  As Wendell says, this endless competition leaves us all exhausted eventually.  We have wisdom that tells us this is not a good thing and it goes back a very long way, but even more recently in the very Constitution that so many who rabidly endorse capitalism practically treat as holy canon, we find the following at the very top of the page:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.

You can read that and focus on liberty that allows you to look out for number one if you want, but I think the framers of that document, flawed though they may have been, had a higher goal in mind: Commonweal, it's an old word, but it's a word that I think we need to come around to once again.  This is about more than just tax reform, but it is reflected in the self-admitted goal of the direction the GOP has been moving us: market driven, lean government, less taxes, less regulations and ultimately fewer margins, survival of the fittest, the ultimate dream of capitalism, and a brutal way of being a human society.
Friedrich Nietzsche, not exactly a man known for his sunny sentimentality even recognizes that human life needs to rise above this sort of nihilism:

Imagine being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power, how could you live according to this indifference? Living, is that not precisely wanting to be different? 

Margins are human way of dealing with nature's wastefulness and her indifference. We use margins, in our spiritual lives, in our communities and in our use of the natural world in order to be healthy.  We need margins so that we have some shock absorption when we run into a limit. In the story of the Garden of Eden, God prescribes a limit for Adam and Eve, which they promptly violate.  It was only one limit and they could not live within it, which sets up a rather epic scale for this whole debate.  There were no marginal trees in Eden, only good and evil, and we proved ourselves incapable of dealing with that sort of hard boundary.
If we do not leave ourselves margins we will always be cast out of the garden. Margins have always been a good idea for promoting commonweal. They provide for people on the margins for sure, but they also insulate us all from the precarious uncertainty and indifference of nature.  We are all better off with margins than without them.

 

Unsettling Dialogue (part 2)

If a consumer begins to think and act in consideration of his responsibilities, 

then he vastly increases his capacities as a person.

-Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

We like to talk a lot about our rights. We have constitutional amendments that we define as the Bill of Rights.  There are organizations and groups that are devoted to defending the rights of certain groups of people, or certain rights of all people.  We sometimes argue about what is and is not a right, and consensus on that subject is by no means easy to come by.  Mr. Wendell lifts up a rather important counterbalance to rights: responsibility.  I hear a lot about people claiming their rights, as citizens, as parents, as consumers, but mostly what you see with regard to responsibility is rather the opposite.

There is a good reason for this: 

It may be that when one hands one's responsibilities to an organization, one becomes by that divestiture irresponsible.  It may be that responsibility is intransigently a personal matter - that a responsibility can be fulfilled or failed, but cannot be got rid of.

Groups and communities can help you with your rights, inalienable and otherwise, but with regard to living up to your responsibilities, you are by definition on your own.  This is a bugaboo of modern politics: people confuse rights and responsibilities and do not adequately recognize the intricate and intimate connection of the two.  When people complain that their rights have been violated, one of the exploitative responses is to point out that they somehow failed their responsibility.  We see this rather brutally played out in the criminal justice system where incarceration rates are abysmally out of balance with regard to black folks.  When you point out that injustice, an inevitable response is, well "they" are criminals, meaning people who have broken faith with the laws and responsibilities of citizenship. The drastic failure of responsibility in criminal behavior is the excuse for many people to never examine the systemic inequality that leads to a statistically observable injustice. Politicians of a certain bent will say that anyone who points to the flaw is "soft" or "weak on crime," but in doing so they are failing their responsibility as public servants, which is to provide for the common good. The common good, in my mind would mean a just society from bottom to top. Injustice at any level compromises the common good. Inversely, if a criminal blames the system for his bad behavior, he is also failing his responsibility to be a law abiding citizen.  The web of responsibility is complicated, the idea of rights is simple by comparison, so it's easier to shout about.
Many people would rather relinquish their rights than assume full responsibility, we would rather be safe than free.  Those who covet power are not ashamed to exploit this weakness, and Berry points out that this is not just a slogan of revolutionaries and dissidents, it applies to our habits as consumers:

People whose governing habit is the relinquishment of power, competence and responsibility, and whose characteristic suffering is the anxiety of futility, make excellent spenders. They are the ideal consumers. By inducing in them little panics of boredom, powerlessness, sexual failure, mortality, paranoia, they can be made to buy (or vote for) virtually anything that is "attractively packaged." The advertising industry is founded upon this principle.

Have we become a people that could be described that way?  I think so, more than I would like to admit personally.  Consumption can absolutely be a drug used to numb the anxiety of existence. When I buy something I want I feel good, when I buy something I have convinced myself I need, I feel even better.  I can be convinced by politicians that if I vote for them they will do the things I agree with and want for my country, even though they have been proven liars for far too long.  I think that we even apply a consumer mindset to our spiritual lives and worshiping communities.  Churches have, all too often used the tools of advertising and the exploitative mindset to take power away from people and put it in the hands of a hierarchy or a cult of personality.  It does not serve us well in the long run, because Christ, our center was in fact a paradigm of responsibility, not just for himself, but for other people.  He revealed the moral rules of the law to be founded upon a broader, communal standard: "love one another."
The exploitative consumer is incapable of loving anything other than their own appetites.  Love is reduced to lust, industriousness and ingenuity are reduced to greed, noble ambition is reduced to power grabbing.  What is the way out?

What has not been often said, because it did not need to be said until fairly recent times, is that the responsible consumer must also be in some way a producer. Out of his own resources and skills, he must be equal to some of his own needs.

This is, I think, why I feel so good after I go out and cut up a dead tree and split the logs for firewood, rather than just going down to the store and buying a bundle of firewood for $5.  The fire feels warmer, I swear it does.  This is why I feel proud any time I can take something old and fix it or, re-purpose some bit of junk I have laying around.  This is why I am sort of in love with the idea of hunting, even if I'm a bit troubled by killing, the idea of providing something to eat from the wild and connecting with the food chain.  It's why I like to garden, even if I put way more money (and time) into it than it's actually worth.  It's why I bother with a compost bin where I slowly try and create good humus from peels and grounds.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still a fairly inveterate consumer. I have not grasped my own responsibility firm enough to go off the grid and live as a hunter gatherer.  I still use Amazon.com as a drug to break me out of a funk.  That's why I'm calling this a dialogue, because it's not one sided, it goes back and forth between what I would like to be and what I am.

Unsettling Dialogue

If you have read this thing for a while, you know that I am a fan of Wendell Berry.  I like his poetry best, I think it rises to the level of prophetic speech at times.  I enjoy reading about the fictional denizens of Port William in books like Hannah Coulter and Jayber Crow.  It is his non-fiction, in the form of books and essays of cultural and (I think) spiritual critique that let you see the clear thought and bracing wisdom behind the poems and the stories.  I had a doctor's appointment today and my doc is notoriously behind schedule so I brought a book, which just happened to be Berry's Unsettling of America.  I like to bring books I've already read to waiting places, because I can absorb the distractions better if I kind of know what I'm reading already.
Unsettling was first published in 1977, and Berry, in the preface says that time is the enemy of a critique such as the one he was putting out there.  The world of agriculture (which is the subject of the book at least on the surface) was in flux and he was trying to see larger trends that might prove to be timely.  What he actually managed to capture in much of the book is a rather timeless analysis of human culture.  Sure some of his more nitty gritty criticisms of certain policies and practices and the occasional person are a little out-dated, but the premise that what afflicts our most basic industry (the production of food) is really a canary in a coal mine for larger cultural issues, was spot on, and I would say prophetic.
I talk about this book a lot, some of you may have heard me extolling its virtues, but as I waited for my medical specialist to tell me what the various numbers revealed by blood tests and such mean for my overall health, I was reminded again of how prescient Mr. Berry actually was by the following paragraph, remember first published 40 years ago, when Jimmy Carter was President.  Berry was working on a different way of seeing the differences between people and even within individual psyches, other than liberal/conservative, democrat/republican, capitalist/communist.  He did not break entirely out of the mindset of dualism, but he did offer one of the better dichotomous classifications I have read recently: Exploitative versus Nurturing.  We all have a little of both in us and some people are more dominated by one or the other, but the two attitudes are clearly at odds with one another, and in this case it is fairly clear to see that one is more prone to immorality than the other.  Anyway here's what he says about the exploitive (sic) mindset:

The first principle of the exploitive mind is to divide and conquer.  And surely there has never been a people more ominously and painfully divided as we are - both against each other and within ourselves.  Once the revolution of exploitation is under way, statesmanship and craftsmanship are gradually replaced by salesmanship (the craft of persuading people to buy what they do not need and do not want for more than it is worth) Its stock in trade in politics is to sell despotism and avarice as freedom and democracy.  In business it sells sham and frustration as luxury and satisfaction.  The "constantly expanding market" first opened in the New World by fur traders is still expanding - no longer so much by expansions of territory or population, but by the calculated outdating, outmoding, and degradation of goods by the hysterical self-dissatisfaction of consumers that is indigenous to an exploitative economy.

I almost dropped my book.  This has been going on for my entire life, in fact, Berry makes the argument that it is not some sort of late modern mutation, but rather a fundamental characteristic of the American (New World) mindset. We now have politicians who are primarily salesmen and the Clintonian maxim that "it's the economy stupid," has become canonical to the point where we don't even flinch when new and more draconian forms of exploitation show their faces.
As we speak, we have a salesman/conman (depending on your opinion) for President, people are drooling over $1000 iPhones that they really don't need, and up the road in D.C. they are working on a tax plan that is going to achieve the exploiter's wet dream of corporate tax cuts at the expense of regular people, at the expense of exploding the national debt (which for 8 years of the Obama Presidency was like the black plague, but which now seems like just the cost of doing business).
Tell me how a Kentucky farmer saw this so clearly when I was three years old.  Why didn't anyone listen to him?
That's enough for now, my doc told me my blood pressure was high, so I need to relax.  But I'm going to come back with more Unsettling, it's just too important to stop there.