The moment when our nation changed forever.

JVS

Not since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has a person been elected President at a more propitious time in the history of the Republic; that he is of African and American descent marks this day November 4, 2008 a watershed in the nation’s political culture. As an urban, educated, Christian and Black Senator, President-elect Barak Obama will define this era of engagement, of hope and can do spirit for our troubled nation in ways that will defy our old categories of partisanship.

It has been said that President Lyndon Johnson, when he was signing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, recognized he would change the complexion of the country’s electoral alignment and seal the fate of the old segregationist-prone Democratic Party in border and Southern states. But yesterday’s election reveals that Johnson’s vision also enabled this fragile democratic process to work and to effectively deal politically with the nation’s troubles by electing Barak Obama, yesterday. We and he stand now together to face among the greatest threats we have ever encountered: war, financial collapse, scandal, rising social inequality, a deteriorating technological infrastructure and ecological support system.

President-elect Obama deserves our uncommon support for unifying the nation to face the twin domestic and international fractures that threaten to bring down the very rights we all cherish as free people. His opportunity –in light of our history, our Civil War, and our political culture– is a watershed moment. That is, a defining period in which we will never again be the same because we have crossed an invisible barrier in the flow of events.

Savor this moment, invest in our national success and demand a renaissance of freedom that this new opportunity gives to us all. In the narrowest of views based on our political history, the Senate of the United States, by offering up three of its own members in this now finished presidential race, re-asserted its proper right to take back this nation’s power from those who had squandered their mandate, sullied the constitution, and bankrupted two generations of working Americans.

The wave of change you are feeling today is a convergence of desires for a fair and constitutional nation, a people resisting racial prejudice, and an electorate expressing its fatigue with the politics of distraction while a foreign policy of unilateral-preemptive war robs us of our allies in a world too small to tolerate provocative policies that divide us.

Congratulations Mr. President-elect and all 100 million plus Americans who voted — together all of us made history.

<!–[if supportFields]> TIME \@ "dddd, MMMM d, yyyy" <![endif]–>Wednesday, November 5, 2008<!–[if supportFields]><![endif]–>

Four weeks out from the end of term and I have paid special attention to global warming, lost cities, staggering declines in bird populations and a talk I am to give on Charles Darwin. There is of course my attention to the papers I have been reading, evaluating and placing a value on, but there is also the attention I have given to interpreting Octavio Paz to my classes and to Karen Horney. Both of these people were in the early 1950s concerned with identity.

What was in the air that a German doctor and psychoanalyst and a Mexican diplomat while in Paris would both pay such attention to this matter of what it means to be a human being? They were living in post fascist, cold-war torn Europe and America, subjected to the brutality of war, the holocaust and the iron curtain. The conclusion of both the World Wars certainly had a profound impact on my parents and their parents generations. I suspect the questions raised by these basically European civil wars –and savage conflicts they were, where people were reduced to insignificance first my machines and then by the “dogs” of war only to be turned into slaves and commercial products in concentration camps– can never be fully answered. Clearly, Paz and Horney , like Jung, Fromm, and dozens of writers were appalled and assaulted by what had transpired in the twentieth century. The irony of senseless wars amidst some of the most astounding technological achievements and scientific discoveries were not lost on historians, cultural critics, or the reflective personality.

As we approach the memorial month of VE or Victory in Europe day, I am reminded by the readings I assign that identity or the loss of a tangible and comprehensible identity is a preoccupation of the post war period.

Being concerned about your identity, is at first glance, the apparent preoccupation of –well, someone with time on their hands. The very fact we have the capacity to ask the question, suggests a certain level of comfort that more pressing questions such as what should I work to achieve, how can I survive, with whom should I confess my sincerest doubts, and for whom do I serve are all questions that have been answered.

Horney insists that we are capable of losing ourselves and that some neurotic people suffer from a syndrome called “psychic fragmentation,” which is a sort of loss of integrity because you do not experience yourself as a unified or integrated personality. There are many aspects of life such as demands made upon us by others, or the desire to escape some real or imagined hideousness about our character that we may desire to avoid and thus we become detached, even from ourselves.

I am not sure that people living from hand to mouth have such preoccupations, but clearly the people of the leisure class and those of us with secure work can fall into the “loss of identity” preoccupation. And if it is true that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” then I suppose self-reflection may be turned into an attribute. For Paz the diplomat and Horney the therapist humanity and not the individual was their motivation for understanding why humans behave so badly to one another. Each understood that personal drives are dialectically complicated and that we are composite beings, neither fully one kind of person nor fully another. Both recognized the fact that we tend to externalize the “other” from wich we are estranged in our own beings and then place blame on that externalized other so as to relieve our own responsibility for the things we do.

This externalization is I would argue part of what is needed to survive in a war and that every combat condition or each assault on enemies an civilians brings out this need for people in a society to externalize the deamons they perceive and to suggest that the “other” deserve to be degraded even to the point of erradication.

We of course, today are in a war, and I help pay for that war everyday I go to work. Every time I fill up my car’s tank with petrol I cast another stone at my externalized enemy, who really is me. Why — well because I need this car and its precious fuel to get to work, to pay the bills and to keep my taxes flowing into the machinery of dehumanization and war.

Some will say it is a defensive war –whatever that means– since Germans in 1939 thought they were defending themselves from Poland. But I am complicit. I am guilty and I inflict carnage at arms length on a people in Afghanistan and Iraq whom I actually have nothing against. So I write of a profound sense of fear that I cannot fit things together anymore, unless I realize that I am responsible for the carnage, the boken lives and the 4,000 Americans who died to keep me driving around in senseless circles of consumption, just so I can keep from understanding the world and in the meantime get paid to talk about how writers in the twentieth century have felt that we suffer from a loss of identity and we lack coherence as psychologically healthy beings.

Both Horney and Paz –for different reasons– believe that the greater purpose of people is to strive for something greater than their own preoccupation with their fractured souls. Both decried the emotional narcissism and externalized alienation that were so characteristic of their times and mine. Horney felt there was a sort of evolutionary gyroscope that enabled people to be more whole and moral beings, to recognize the actual conditions of the world and our place in that cosmos. Paz believed taht we could transcend the “nightmare” that is our collective and personal histories and unite to make sense out of the “senseless, torture chambers of reason.” I would, of course hope they are correct. But my generation, far from improving the world, is going about fracturing what little is left of humanity and devouring the natural capital that keeps us alive. That is, the natural storehouse of services we extract from the biological world. These storehouses of capital –accumulated over centuries– are all that stands between nature foreclosing on our hyper-industrial culture and from calling in our debts to the millions of other species with which we share this planet. So my need to fuel my car is an even greater egregious act than I can be aware of, because I am unravelling the fabric of nature so that my country can unravel the fabric of Iraqi society.

If there is an order –as Darwin suggested there is an order, or as Einstein insisted there is that order external to our perception of the world– then I have been tearing up parts of that order to fit them into my needs, as opposed to fitting better into the order of the world that created me. By that I mean the world that I am born into, live in and the ecology that sustains my needs and nourishes my curiosity. All of that world helps to create me.

I cannot keep breaking up the world’s ecological and social order. I must change and in so changing, I must consider a means of restoring, even a piece of the world, so that I –in the end– don’t break-apart something really important. For if, by my actions, something really vital to the functioning o fthe world could be harmed, then I destroy my nest, my niche, and my noosphere. If my actions and those of others end in destroying the resilience of the world and not just the social comity that binds me to you and you to me, then what have we done?

As John Donne insisted, “everyman’s death diminishes me.” Four thousand deaths later I am not a better person for having ignored the immoral war my nation engages in and which I work to support. Blessed are they who can worry about their identity for they shall be unable to see that hey, like we all are responsible for a great wrong. My life has been diminished by their deaths and I must in some way make amends, that is all I know to do, since there appears to be no way out of this hell. And the diversions will not last. So will I act and repair the damage, and if so when?

In the Mississippi delta the recovery is not yet underway, do not let people fool you –it is a desperate situation there for the folks who live after the deluge. We went because I had to do something, to take some personal responsibility for the fact that our nation turns its back on these people and their capacity to live with sorrow among the rubble of lost dreams scattered along vast highways of despair. These are the families of the forgotten classes because they are not even recognized as members of an underclass.

I dreaded going back to New Orleans, I feared the emotions that flooded over my soul the first time I saw the Ninth Ward six months after the deluge. Then too, I dreaded the odor I had consumed last year this time when we gutted houses. It was a fragrance of shame. Shame that I was going through the personal effects of those missing in the deluge. There was the despair I felt at picking up a young boy’s soiled jacket caked with the mud of carelessness, That is the carelessness of politicians and Army engineers who could not ensure the safety of these people due to the poor design and quality of the flood walls and storm surge barriers that these people had constructed.

Because the extent of the disaster was so large we were unable to build houses and re-establish homesteads. The dread sustained the fear and this fear grew to nourish the dread;Møbius strip of reinforcement, because there is no other side of this story–there only appears to be two sides to the same calamity. Here the levees failed and with their breech came the choice to rise to this challenge and re-invent a city and its neighborhoods. That is a story that folds back upon itself in an endless repetition of loss and real suffering. Connected here are twin themes in the same story of loss and recovery because they are part of the same inside that turns into an outside and as it does we lose our sense of proportion, then eviscerating our sense of dignity for the civic life that once sustained these neighbors and harbored their hopes for their children’s and all children’s future.

This place is one endless monotony of empty, abandoned, or still damaged homes that stand as cenotaphs of our capacity to ignore the obvious, burden the victims and put obstacles in the way of those who seek to improve the conditions of those who need and desire to re-inhabit this, now hallowed ground. The lower Mississippi delta has been sanctified with deaths and reinvigorated lives of these –once fortunate residents– for whom luck also evacuated when the swift advance of the great gulf storm of August 29, 2005 forever altered this watery deposition at the edge of a warm inland sea.