Perhaps the relative lack of seeable possibilities is part of what triggers/formulates ways of thinking that we associate with psychiatric diagnosis. This would help explain why we see someone like Jared Loughner as “deranged” or a “wackjob.” As humans we wish to make sense of our world in order to help us understand our possible roles within it. When we do not see those possibilities, we order our worldview in such a way that allows us to cope with what fundamentally doesn’t make sense: a world that does not recognize the obvious fact of our existence.
Our conclusions regarding this attempt to explain ourselves sometimes influence our actions; they generally influence our beliefs.
If so, this explanation reinforces the notion that individual agency is a fundamental part of being human and that successful cultures enhance and are enhanced by the agency of individuals within them. In some sense, and to rediscover an old idea from a new pathway, Jared Loughner is a manifestation of the overall illness of our culture. Because we expect a certain amount of individual control in our culture, we find it difficult to excuse his actions, but we are not yet prepared to admit that we have collectively failed to turn the agency of all individuals into possibility and thereby honor it and his humanity
–Lael Ewy
Political liberty is really a quaint, late 18th Century bourgeois notion. What people actually need is security in terms of themselves and their means of survival (including material possessions, folkways, methodologies of hunting, building, even complex civilization)—in other words, culture. In order to achieve this security on an individual level, people also need agency, here defined as a sense of control over one’s fate, one’s decision-making, one’s relation to others. Agency can take many forms, and political liberty as we understand it in the United States and Western Europe is one. Agency can also exist in the exercise of one’s role as a member of a band of hunter-gatherers, for instance; even though that role may seem fairly strictly defined in comparison to the mores and norms of our culture, the individual has a clear role in obtaining food, building shelter, raising children. Her actions within that culture make clear change in the world in a way that is directly related to her fate and that of her band.
Cultures thrive when they are able to exploit (in the positive sense of “make useful”) the agency of the individuals within the culture to the mutual benefit of all the other members. Individuals are thereby rewarded for practicing their agency in terms of better chances of survival, more comfort and security, and more solid and meaningful relations with people and the world. Cultures themselves benefit as well, since healthy cultures are able to transmit their ways of life to following generations, and even to other, less stable cultures.
This is agency in symbiosis, and it involves the mutual acknowledgement and respect of the particular talents and gifts of individuals, which is only possible through an awareness of those gifts and how they can and should be developed for the sake of the whole. This is the great innovation of culture as a technology of survival: it is able to develop human talent and potential without having to kill anybody off. It is a way of evolving with great speed and little waste and of adapting in a way that makes Darwin’s observations about natural selection, for humans anyway, moot.
No culture is perfect, of course, and no culture provides agency in symbiosis all the time and for all its members. But we must be aware of how well the culture that we are a part of is going about it; its level of success has a direct impact on the culture’s survival and adaptability to change and on the survival and suffering of those served by it.
–Lael Ewy
It had never really been my intention to own a 1992 Dodge 4X4 pickup. But I’ve always appreciated having access to an older truck, a work truck that was happiest being abused. This had always been my dad’s 1990 Dodge diesel, but when he gave that to my brother, I was out of a ready alternative.
A game of musical trucks transpired, and I ended up with said brother’s ’92 for a decent price. It’s a great old truck if you don’t mind fist-sized rust holes and a loud exhaust. Oh, and the fact that neither the gas gauge nor the odometer worked. Not a deal breaker, the last two, but severely limiting. So, after purchase, I decided to replace the offending part and fix the gauge. Since the gas sending unit and the fuel pump are all the same part, I figured it would be a good chance to replace the pump, a little extra insurance when I’m out hauling crap around or towing home a project Volvo.
I enlisted the help of a friend of mine who is good with tools and out of work, and so equipped with a limited number of excuses. By sight, replacing the fuel pump assembly on a ’92 Dodge truck is a pretty straightforward job: the tank needs to come down, but it’s just hooked up to a few fuel lines, the fuel filler neck, a vent tube, and two metal straps held on by a couple of threaded studs and two nuts on one end and slotted holes in the frame on the other. One wouldn’t need any automotive experience to shimmy under the truck and see instantly what needed to be done.
And so we started in, securing the tank with what we thought was a good, solid steel-framed floor jack, as even though it is a plastic tank and not terribly heavy, we had no way to know how much fuel was actually in it, and no way to measure how big a container we would need if we siphoned the fuel out of the tank.
I reasoned that it would be easier to just unscrew the big plastic collar that kept the pump assembly in the tank instead of fiddling with the lines in the narrow space between the tank and the bottom of the bed, and while I was doing that, my friend was unhooking the filler neck and breather tube. The plan was to use the jack to slowly drop the tank and just let the relatively light pump assembly dangle by the fuel lines. Now the only thing to be done was to loosen the nuts and pull the metal bands away.
A bit of rust develops over the course of 19 years, though, especially when the vehicle is and has always been a work truck, stored outside and seldom washed. One nut broke free with relative ease after a good dosing of a WD-40 clone. The back one, however, was not so willing. Because the nuts were recessed in a frame rail and the stud too long even for our longest deep socket, we had to use a combination wrench to get them loose and slowly work them past the rail. Even after backing up the wrench with another wrench for more leverage, the nut barely budged. And, of course, the stud began to turn. Fortunately for us, Dodge cheaped out and used a clip to secure the stud instead of threading the frame and risking rusting the stud to the frame; we managed, with much effort, pull the stud and nut out, as a sort of unplanned, funny-looking bolt.
Right when we got the stud/nut/bolt out, we discovered the mettle of our jack. Needless to say, the tank came down, and surprisingly little gas was sploshed about, but not knowing the tank’s weight, it was sort of scary being underneath a truck with large parts of it falling close by. Lesson learned: test the jack first.
This was just the foretaste, as that same fastener that caused us trouble would eventually take an hour to get back in. It seems as if metal bands get distorted when a tank half full of gas is pushing against them and a jack is pushing up against it. Lesson learned: no matter the risks or the pain, drain the tank first.
In between, there was at least an hour trying to figure out what the part was that I destroyed trying to unhook (a rollover switch that cuts the fuel off if the truck goes upside down; we decided the solution to the problem was simply not to roll the truck), and another hour running back to our respective houses to find a better brace of jacks. All told, the process took about eight hours—a full day’s work. I’ve done engine swaps in shorter amounts of time.
In the end, frustrated and tired, cold and hungry, we hooked everything back up and my friend cranked the engine over. After a few cycles to get the system primed, the truck roared to life, stronger than ever. And that’s when we noticed the stream of gas spewing out of the pump assembly and all over the floor of the shop.
I wish there were some deep third lesson I could provide here, other than the fact that fuel lines deteriorate over time, and sometimes merely the act of pulling them off and putting them back on is too much, but I knew that, of course, and put the old ones on anyway. So maybe what we come away with is that the writer of Genesis was right: life is interminable toil. And the writer of Ecclesiastes was righter: sometimes it’s all vanity. Faulkner provides an adjunct: in the face of the previous observations, there is a solution: to endure.
–Lael Ewy
Headline: Goldman Sachs gets record $500 million fine. Passes hat in office, pays it off.
Meanwhile, Fabrice Torre gets Scootered; the truly responsible skate. As NPR reported this morning, no management changes are expected at Goldman, even after they admitted fraud. In other words, the world is still safe for the rich and privileged.
Meanwhile, the NAACP Uncle Toms on its previous statements asking the Tea Party movement to repudiate the racists among its ranks after Tea Party leader Mark Williams goes all Mel Gibson and says this:
“You’re dealing with people who are professional race-baiters, who make a very good living off this kind of thing. They make more money off of race than any slave trader ever. It’s time groups like the NAACP went to the trash heap of history where they belong with all the other vile racist groups that emerged in our history.”
So, Mark Gibso—er, Williams accuses the NAACP of being worse than slave traders and racists and gets away with it, with Ben Jealous and Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson all bowing to this guy? Really? And they wonder why the NAACP is viewed as largely ineffective?
The facts are these: Tea Party activists spat on members of the Congressional Black caucus and called them niggers. They called Barney Frank a faggot, and they support Arizona’s blatantly racist anti-immigrant law. Are they all bigots? Of course not, but Mel, er Mark Williams’ statement, if it is in any way indicative of Tea Party sentiments, would suggest that they are more racist than not.
Even more disturbing, Williams’ words provide a perfect opportunity to simply expose what these people are actually like and let their movement self-destruct as we’ve been waiting for it to do for the past year or so. All the NAACP had to do was issue a counter-statement saying “See? That’s what we’re talking about!” Even CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN wouldn’t have been able to ignore that, as they did Williams’ initial riposte.
Exposing the truth about the nutjobs, in their own words, is exactly the sort of tactic Edward R. Murrow used to stop McCarthy, and Murrow had the courage to counter the Red Scare in much more dire circumstances. After all, we had genuine worries; the Russian Bear had megatons of nukes with which to strike us. Last I checked, black folk and Mexicans were not so well equipped. The Mainstream Media has everything to gain (ratings, particularly) if they pursue this fight, and the NAACP has the chance to regain its reputation as being a genuine force against racism and of actually appealing to millions of disillusioned black youth. This is a tremendous missed opportunity, and its ramifications can be seen in what follows.
As McLatchy news service has it, a list of 1300 illegal immigrants has been anonymously circulated in Utah, causing the governor to investigate, and “worrying” Hispanic residents. So the Red Scare is replaced with the Brown Scare. But it gets worse. Not willing to simply name names, as McCarthy did, this latest list draws on the power of contemporary information gathering and provides “Social Security numbers, birth dates, workplaces, addresses and phone numbers,” along with names of children and the due dates of pregnant women. An accompanying letter “demands that those on [the list] be deported immediately.”
How long, then, before the Brown Scare leads to our own bands of Brown Shirts, harassing and expelling every Latino or Latina they see? How long before they just start beating up swarthy guys with farmer’s tans like me? It’s a chilling development, and my local paper saw fit to give it three short paragraphs on page 8.
The tendency in the ultra-right is toward ethnic cleansing, fueled by paranoia and bigotry. Whether they call themselves Tea Partiers or law and order conservatives or patriots of what-have-you, their motives are mean-spirited and their actions reminiscent of the worst history has to offer.
And we are doing little or nothing to stop them.
T.S. deHaviland