Stronger Speaking: Simple Seasoned Steps

to Fundamental Confidence

         Pure exhilaration—More than a decade of it now as I’ve been teaching effective public and professional speaking to college students and clients. Every time I start afresh, it’s back to square one with a new group or person whose minor and sometimes-major habits of speech are disempowering them—usually and first of all, with those too-universal killers of attention and meaning: like, um, ya know, and up-talk (or, the constant question-tone?).

Call and leave yourself a 2-minute message about your day.

At the start of it, state your full name.

Then, next day, call back and listen to it.

Did you state your name in a “question?”-tone of voice?

Reverse that to a downward-ending tone, and hear the difference.  

If you have 250 words with which to move your life forward,

and 146 of them are blank noise, what are your chances?

           If I see transformations in these people all the time (and I do), it’s because of each “generation’s” frank feedback. What worked and what didn’t on the way to these new powers in your speech? So this is a short sharing of the most basic, key changes most people made, and some of the simple techniques that got them there.

          For the record, the age of The Dale Carnegie Speak Like An Authoritative White Man Program is bygone. The central point is to clean up and to keep refining how you play your own unique instrument of expression: your voice and language. Together they vibrate who you are and what you intend out into the world.

        A recent student with a beautifully musical full name asked whether she should introduce herself, in interviews and first-meetings, without the music. Somewhere in there is the secret of all speaking. For if she wants to trade her music for that killer job, that will describe what she’s signing up for in the chilled-down saying of her name. I told her to keep the music—Like a true charm, it will guide and guard her against any job that kills it.

       I observe that every person who makes even basic changes begins to express something powerfully their own and no one else’s. Some of them shake the room like inspired evangelicals, and others speak the meanings of half a novel in the lifting of one hand or just an eyebrow at the right times. What amazes is the endless variety of real expressive power—so I hope this offering helps to liberate yours.

       If we don’t get to work together, you’ll find more advanced ways to do that in 21^st Century Speaking: Power Toward Every Goal, which is available at my professional website Ancientlights.org.

Let’s go!

***

     Performance Anchors are basic elements of excellence that every public speaker must have. Starting right here, you must deal for real with each basic aspect. One point at a time, be 100% sure you have conquered this first Chapter each time you speak. Do that, and right away you stand out from the herd, without seeming to try: the world’s first clues of your first-rate standards in all things.

      Basics first. This offering from is a primary check-list to apply every time you get ready to speak. Conquer a few basics, and then your brain and your style are 10 times more free of the petty obstacles and worries that hold back your real powers.

***

Your New Motto, the Bottom Line of Confidence:

ANYTHING BUT HOMEWORK CAN GO WRONG.

      You’re in the audience as a speaker falls right on his face before the first word. But he gets up and delivers a talk that changes the world before your eyes. There’s no doubt of the substance in the style. You take it home because it gives you more real command of the subject. So, what do you remember of the evening? The power of the talk.

       It’s the same each time you speak. Above is your new motto and new first assumption as a speaker. Let’s explore why. First:

Nothing changes about the world when you get up to speak.

      You feel safe when you’re in the audience. You’re with, and hidden by, a group. Its eyes are fixed on someone else. You sit in the chair of a judge, with (of course) your own perfect calm mixture of wide-awake open mind and intelligent skepticism.

       You pity and admire a speaker just for being up there, so exposed, but going for it. Most people in an audience are more or less like this.

       They do not disappear or turn vicious when you get up there.

       Remember that “you” are still in the audience—all those curious and mostly-supportive people as real as yourself. If you A) know what you’re talking about, and B) work with all your best practice behind you to communicate, nothing that matters can detract from your effectiveness.

     From now on, speak with this first fact in your bones.

     From hecklers to bomb-scares, Anything can go wrong and do you no harm as a speaker—if you meet the essentials for which you are responsible in a first-rate speaking event.

      What are those responsibilities?

***

HOMEWORK, & PRACTICE ALOUD

     Homework and Practice Aloud work together in a circular process that grows more powerful each time you come through it.

     Homework is the process by which you discover (and learn how to demonstrate) answers to questions that people can judge for themselves. It’s all to your confidence and power that most people work the opposite way—starting with an opinion built from unexamined assumptions, and shoring it up with a few select authorities.

          There are criteria for demonstrating Homework (to come). Here, understand that Homework enables you to demonstrate substance—a reasoned and real contribution to your subject. All the tricks of language go to hide this when it’s lacking. When substance is there, you can’t lose.

          Homework answers three questions in clear solid terms:

A) What facts, and varying views of them, do people need to grasp this subject?

B) What must they have learned when they forget 85% of what you’ve said and shown? And,

C) How does each part of the content drive that home?

          Practice Aloud brings the physical body to bear on the brain-work above. Half of a powerful speaking experience is a physical event. So you absolutely must include Practice Aloud to make the most of its benefits.

          How can you claim them?

          You can think all day and write all night. Words will go round and round and convince each other (and finally, you) of their deep sense. Then, when you speak them aloud—especially to someone else—you instantly know what’s good, and what has to be far better.

          Ernest Hemingway called the human ear “a one hundred percent foolproof shit detector.” When you sit in an audience, you instinctively know fluff from substance. So, stop letting go of that skill just because it’s now you who is speaking. When you know that a sentence or point isn’t good enough, face the message and take real action.

          Your ear is not only your best merciless editor. It’s part of your body, which—as the complement of your scientist’s brain—is the artist in your speaking style, who brings every perfect nuance into the event.

          Much more to come on how that works and happens and grows. First, recognize another way that Practice Aloud empowers you.

          The human brain in some conceptions has two sides—again, the cool rational scientist and the emotional, intuitive artist. So, at any given time along your day and preparation process, you’re in one mode or the other. (Sleep is a third mode, too: go over a talk just before your day’s rest, and next morning you bring a sharp editor to work.)

          Make an ally of this by doing your Homework and Practice Aloud at different times, in different moods, and in different environments. (You can call it Mood Editing.) It seasons your speaking with all the different aspects of yourself. Some sessions improve content, and some improve strategies, rhythm and style.

          Each Homework/Practice cycle tells you how to grow more powerful. The main points here:

*Anything but homework can go wrong.

*The audience is as ready for me as I was for other speakers.

*I’ve done my absolute best homework. I have diligently practiced aloud again and again.

*On these grounds, I have earned an expectation that I can trust: Whatever happens, it’s going to be my best.

***

Basic Performance Anchors: Next Steps

Switch On

          You don’t have to be a perfect speaking being. Half of language is about the pleasures of bonding. We go crazy unless we have places to talk without rules and high-end standards.

     The point is to know the difference that most people don’t. There are times for pure play, and times when you speak to advance your life—to land a business loan, to meet the dean, or deliver substance to your peers. Not to mention interpersonal affairs.

     From now on—in Practice Aloud, and before you aim to speak with power—raise a hand to your temple, and turn on a Switch there.

When the Switch is on, we speak only our best.

          Your Switch puts an end to habits that rob you of power:

     Most of all, waste in our words. If you have 250 words to impress the world, but 170 are “Like,” “Um,” and/or “You know,” it’s over. These dead-air sounds have other guises, too—for example, “Well,” “So,” “Then,” and “And” itself.

       Dead-air noise is a plea, the crudest of place-holders in a talk. What it speaks is lack of real confidence. Does blank meaningless noise between words and sentences keep people listening? In fact, the opposite is true (more on this). 

          Difficult, but crucial—The Switch also means no more of the “Question Tone?” Some call this “Up-Talk?”—when the tone or arc of every phrase? and sentence? seems to be posing a question? Worse, it sounds timid? Tentative, and immature?

         “They say it’s going to rain today?” “I think you’re on fire?” “You make a brilliant point?”

         See Middle Voice below for more on getting rid of Up-Talk. First, here’s how to create a Switch that’s strong and reliable:

        Pause More, with a Breath; Work in Shorter Sentences; and, Slow It Down. Start “high” in your voice-range, and end each sentence low. The richer style you want will return (or grow), but without these killers.

       Accomplish one “clean” sentence at a time. Start from the higher “bright” end of your range, and you have nowhere to go (short of comedy or hysterics) except down in tone to the finish. It gets easier fast, and the differences make you want more.

      Deal with these small problems, and you stand out in every group in both diction and rhythm. You draw the world in without seeming to try.

      Start from where you are. A dictaphone or recorder will not lie about where you need work in the basics. Put your Switch on—and leave yourself some long phone messages. Talk about your day or a movie, tell a story or a joke. Then call back a day later—and be honest about how clean or “noisy” your best speaking presently is.

      Two very important tips about your Switch:

A) Your Switch goes on just before you start speaking, and stays on until after you sit down again—especially through deceptively-informal Q&A, Discussions or Interviews!  

B) If you tell a story that includes dialogue, be sure to use “He/She said”—or better, action verbs (for examples, “yelled,” “whispered,” “announced”). Never use “He/She was like…” or “He/She goes….”

     These Anchors work together to root your performances in confidence. The Switch is a commitment to speaking powerfully or not at all. With groups, I interrupt a speaker when their Switch quits, and ask them to pause and start again. I wish you could hear their peers’ applause when they clear a problem. And I know they’d clap the same for you.

     Alas, I’m not there to annoy you directly till you change. So these next Anchors of equal import show you more of how to install, maintain and strengthen a Switch of your own.

Breathe!

          When early humans hid from predators, they held their breath. We became hard-wired to stop breathing when afraid. So it’s easy to see why people “go blank” just before or during a talk.

          If you cut off oxygen to your body and brain, they interrupt whatever you’re doing to demand more. If your mind goes blank before or during a talk (in spite of your best homework and practice), check this first. You likely need deeper, more sustained, rhythmic breathing.

          In starting practice (with Switch on), take at least 10 long deep breaths (part of Grounding, next section). You’ll feel your nervous system calm down, flush with a fresh oxygen supply. Then, after each sentence, take another deep breath to fuel the next.

          Meet this constant need, and you free up brain-cells to help with what matters. Like a poet, you gain a natural (breath-based) rhythm in the way your sentences unfold. And, you demonstrate (without seeming to try) the confidence to take your time. Plus, a slower pace lets your listeners savor every word and inflection of your talk—the mark of a person sure of the value of their talk.

Grounding

          Life animates us with wild (hard to control) electro-chemical energies. Speaking makes bio-energies surge. Ignore or deny them and they cause (at least) a stiff locked-down posture, that fails anyway to control them. They create nervous “tics” that disconnect the body from a talk’s intended messages (rocking in place, tapping a pen, fishing in pockets, toying with hair, crossing feet). These distract your audience and yourself. There’s a better way.

      The point of Grounding is to find your own physical, bodily ways to rise to and integrate life’s crazy energies into your performance.

          It’s time to speak. You’ve done the Homework and Practice. Your Switch goes on. Your Breathing is deep and rhythmic. And still you feel over-charged with abundant but uncontrollable nervous energy.

      Imagine those forces as a magnificent horse that nothing in the world can tame or hold back. This horse is coming your way, right past you—or, over you if you block its path. What do you do?

      Start running in the same direction—and jump on! You don’t stop it, or miss it. You rise to it, match its pace and power, become one with it. From there, it carries you like pure inexhaustible energy toward your goals.

      How? You must physically explore, identify and do what works for you: your own best bodily ways to rise to and integrate (rather than resist or hide) this source of power.

       With decades of classes and public talks, I still need that Switch and deep Breathing. And, I ground: clap my hands and/or slap them to my sides, or shake fists on the air. When I can, I sing out, or strut a few measures of music that I call kick-ass. Waiting visibly on a stage, I gently wring my hands, or open and close them from tight to loose and stretched. I breathe even more, police my best posture—and see myself still sitting in that audience.

       Yet, there’s always more crazy energy left over. To that I give myself in getting up to speak (what choice is there?), and it fills the first minutes with a Let’s Go enthusiasm.

       Life’s energies enable and empower you. So, welcome them in. Get Playful. You’ve got it when you “shake it off” like an athlete, and no longer feel divided between a top-form speaker and a nervous animal.

      There is only you, “psyched” up into a full-alert state with a calm, poised, ideally-playful center. You’re good, you have earned the right to know it, and you’re ready for the room, whatever the outcome.

      What physical acts lift you up and keep you in that state? Athletes smack and smash into each other. In their state, it feels good.

      Find your own private experimental space, and:

      Imagine—You’re on in less than 5 minutes. You need that high-alert state with a calm core, now. You want to be the center of a storm.

      Let your body do what it needs to do—until you and that nervous body are one being. Clap. Jog in place. Trust the level where this feels good, and learn to go there by refining what worked.

      Each time you hit this state, claim the reward: consummate it with a smashing delivery of (for example) a song, a poem or some magnificent language that makes you feel alive.

      There are more ways to know when your Grounding rituals work. Nothing improves your speech more than experience and experiment.

      Create a question that needs answering where you are. Do the homework and offer your peers a talk about the findings. Afterward, invite tough feedback on two fronts: How well did your message itself get through? And what were the strong and weak aspects?

      Experiment with these Anchors in all your different speaking situations: dinner table,  workplace and with peers.

      Observe—and each time, connect the Grounding-actions used with your best results. What worked for you: slapping hands to your sides? A few jumping-jacks? The whole process guides you to the best few.

      Above all, welcome that wild horse. Rise to the riding of it. Summon and deliberately match (release and allow) its powers—It’s You. Jump on, hang on and let it carry you through that talk. You mean business.

***

      Homework. Practice Aloud. Switch On. Breathe. Ground. With these first 5 Performance Anchors, we move toward guiding our raw living powers to our goals.

      Let’s backtrack for one moment. If you take the floor as a jumpy and unsettled presence, work again through the first Anchors to avoid this first impression. Deal for real with them, or they sap away power.

     If you settle down into your best style after the first few minutes—having realized that nobody threw anything at your head—realize that A) There’s a need for more Breathing and Grounding beforehand; and, B) You want to know more about what creates your best.

      What are you feeling by the time you hit your best? Consider yourself lead singer in a band: it’s got to be your best from the first. From here on, that is the level where you need to start speaking every time.

      Identify what kinds of Grounding bring you to that state, and apply them. The reward for all this “pre-game” is that in every different speaking circumstance, you have your own sure Anchors for success.

***

Middle Stance, Middle Voice, Middle Face

          These Anchors are three simple norms—of body, sound, and demeanor—which you establish in your own way, and then from which you depart and return throughout a talk. Begin from these basics, and then the ways you play upon them become the basis of your art and style.

      Middle Stance is a strong relaxed posture with feet slightly apart, arms still and loose at your sides. Begin from here, and you wipe the whole expressive slate clean for yourself and the audience.

      It only takes a moment if you wish. Then, if you have Grounded yourself properly, every change of footing and gesture that you make, to vary this “blank slate” of a norm, is one of two things.

      It’s either A) natural and unconscious to you, but still appropriate to what you mean; or, B) a deliberate and artful element of meaning, emphasis and expression.

      Plato and Cicero created catalogues of moves and gestures that evoke certain meanings or emotions with the body. “Hands out on the air” often amplifies a question or a plea. A few strides toward one part of the audience add drama (if appropriate to meaning) on all sides. Arms akimbo can declare a decisive point: a look up, exasperation.

      Start to notice and keep a list of moves and gestures you find especially effective—in dance and sculpture, painting, film and theatre, performance, talks and more.

      Try them where they might match your meanings. For example, in the margin of your outline for a talk’s points, make a note to try one deliberate gesture with each main point. All that’s unique to you will make them yours. At the same time, you raise the odds of connecting with different people in an audience who know a like physical language, and with those who key most on visual messages.

      Middle Voice is your own comfortable middle range or normal tone of voice—loud and clear enough to be heard by every person where you speak. Push it out from your lower diaphragm, with purpose-anew, for each new sentence. Soon, it’s second nature.

      In formal circumstances, this means a volume like a lawyer’s in a court. In closer settings, it means a bit louder than normal, too. The common-sense standard is that everyone can hear each confident word.

      Middle Voice works in the same way as Middle Stance. You establish a “normal” basic tone, and then depart and return to create effects that enrich your talk with levels of meaning.

      By all means (again)—Breathe, and Begin each sentence “high” in your range, to end it “low.” Make each new sentence flow gently downward in tone, like a waterfall with three levels. Start high to add energy: it refreshes a listener’s attention. Along the middle, take your time and unfold those first-rate details. Finally, descend in tone and bring the whole meaning home—as if you’ve arrived at the waterfall’s deep pool.

      Higher tones conjure suspense, or signal a key question. Descending tones create momentum, authority, gravity: they guide us along a process or to a solid conclusion. They can also set up irony and anti-climax.

      Middle Voice reveals how many voices you have, and can acquire. We’ll see more of how these three Anchors take great speaking toward music, and more—toward a 3-dimensional symphony.

          Middle Face links you powerfully to the Neutrals. Never forget: the Neutrals are watching. Neutrals are the major share of almost every audience. (We’ll see why.) Neutrals as such are the people most free to decide where truth is among many speakers.

      If your face shows a sour, snide look of ridicule as you listen to others or invite them to speak, you tell the Neutrals that you aren’t one. If you quote from or talk to others with mockery, the Neutrals see and resent your attempt to bias them with your face, tone and treatment. What you try to inflict on someone else tells about you.

      Whatever happens in a talk, discussion, debate or argument, your face and demeanor express the same equanimity. You present your best self: a person calm and balanced, seasoned, wide-awake, feeling good—pleasantly professional. Focused for work, and flustered by nothing.

          We’ll return (Chapters 2 & 4) to the Neutrals as powerful speaking guides. Henceforth: Always present allies, opponents and the audience with the same Middle Face and demeanor—and most of all, if someone attacks you on personal grounds.

      Breeze past it (and see Combat Skills in Chapter 5). Return to the point that matters to the Neutrals. You never go wrong that way, because it’s public service. It also drops the indignity back onto its speaker, without your lifting a finger.

***

Eye Contact for Everyone

      This Performance Anchor is as crucial as the others. It helps you every time you apply a simple principle, based (like those above) in a kind of golden mean.

          Too much or too little Eye Contact disturbs your connection with listeners. The golden mean is the same if you have one listener or millions. The easy, reliable and effective approach is to make Eye Contact a constant cycle through your speaking event.

          First, one-on-one talks and interviews. Begin each sentence with eyes (in your Middle Face) connected. Toward the middle of each (or, every other) sentence, as your voice descends, let your eyes blink and roam downward, rather than up or “around”—as if working through a rich reflection. At last with your conclusion, re-establish eye contact: it adds confident emphasis. It says you’re ready to go on and open right there to a question or response.

          Walk into a larger speaking situation, and you have one goal for Eye Contact: Start to finish, let not one single person be left out of the event. Again, the Neutrals are watching.

      Locate the person at each extreme position of the audience. Create a visual cycle or sweep that includes every single person present: side to side, and front to back. Each repeated connection sustains their attention and interest, and links you to the Neutrals.

     Henceforth, you sweep every point (each pair of eyes) between those extremes. Connect your Middle Face as you can with each person for about 2 seconds: then move smoothly to the next through your cycle. Whether this means moving just your eyes, your head and/or your whole body, do what it takes to sustain this rhythm all the way.

      We need to work flexibly with the fact that some peoples and cultures prefer less direct Eye Contact in speaking. Yet in most cases, the world expects it—clear and bold. Rise to it.

      Can you show what you’re talking about, so others can judge it for themselves? If so, you’ve earned the right to look people first and often in the eye and deliver. Do not be afraid to “scare” them just a little, with the confidence you earned by your Homework and Practice.

      After all, they’re doing it to you! It’s your invitation forward.

***

          Let’s see how well you command getting ready for your best. What are the 9 Basic Performance Anchors you just read about?

          See how well (in every sense) you can explain each Anchor—aloud, and/or with a listener or recorder.

          Each time you get ready to speak, check in with and apply these 9 Performance Anchors in the order shown. And you will stand out with the best in every group without seeming to try.

          If you need a bit of fear, consider: These are “only” the speaking standards of tough competitors and would-be peers ahead of you.

          We close with the Basic Anchor that enables the most progress with them all, in the least time—if you invest some.

***

The Power(s) of The Pause

      We learn to drive slowly. First we earn real command over each element: then we bring them together to produce a smooth ride, neither timid nor reckless. With experience, the basics become second nature. We grow seasoned, and then cruise at our own speed to our destinations.

          Slow, It, Down.  

          Keep Your Lips Together till you’re truly ready to go on. Pause. Breathe, Ground, and ponder in silence. Then resume.

          Yes, our world hates to wait. But when you pause, and then deliver exactly the right words, people are grateful for the substance. They appreciate the very rare speaker who shows trust in their patience and respect for their attention-span.

      When substance arrives, people forget the wait. Indeed, they come to enjoy the next interval of suspense before something worthwhile.

          A Silent Pause is A) Safety from careless errors; B) Time to breathe and gather what’s next; C) a subtle confident challenge to your listeners; and, D) a part of 3-dimensional rhythm and impact (Chapter 3).

          Slow, It, Down. When you Practice Aloud, add in Silent Pauses (and Breaths). At first, you may sound stiff or pompous. That will change for the better. The point is to regain control—until you command each word, phrase and nuance along the downward tone of each sentence.

      Silent Pauses help the most with all these anchors and improvements. Pauses grace and enrich speech. Dead-air noise and pure speed never will.

      But people speak fast! If you pause, they think you’ve stopped, or they just interrupt. Yes—and so we return to the core of speaking issues, as exampled at the beginning by the student with the musical name. For you have to stand in the shoes of your own speaking-space and style. Let no one move you from your best. When they interrupt, let them—and then, carefully (without notice of interruption, not even with “as I was saying…”) return to your last full sentence. Because you paused, listened and then still got it right, they’ll remember it—and get the hint that talking with you is worth waiting for.

       Or, they won’t. And that’s where speaking well may start to separate you. You’ll look for the pleasures and results of new levels of speaking and listening, and leave old dead-ends behind.

          With a Check-List of these essentials for every speaking-situation coming your way, you gain in the confidence that unlocks your real powers. This is what you must conquer just to cut it in this never-fiercer world of job-competition. And I wish the poet well who is also in you.

http://ancientlights.org/

http://writeandspeakpowerfulenglish.com

in The Boston Globe, November 2, 2011

As a former longtime subscriber to The Boston Globe—which ended when it became a self-styled “family newspaper,” and forfeited whatever teeth and backbone it ever had—I learned early-on to stop reading the opinion-pieces by Mr. Jeff Jacoby.

They were sure to do nothing but darken my day in response to Jacoby’s usual half-baked amalgam of right-wing boilerplate and Bible-based claptrap. In America, that of course is the basis for a distinguished career in “journalism,” which is also why I avoid our “mainstream” media the way I walk around fetid puddles of standing water.

This is a guy who once argued that America owes no “reparations” to either Native Americans or the children of African slaves because, while one group can be safely ignored by the American juggernaut, the other group already got their reparations when the American Civil War set them free. Astonishing—If I hurt you, and then stop hurting you (more or less), we’re even, and no harm done. That’s what The Bible’s “landmark morality” has done for Jeff Jacoby and the American Empire.

Well, I stepped in it today—I just had to read Jacoby’s latest (November 2, 2011) in The Boastin’ Glob, because of its astonishing title—“A Sinful ‘Occupation.’” Oh, shit, I thought. Oh, no. Jeff, like a deacon out of Puritan (fascist) Boston, is going to show us why the worldwide “Occupy” movement is an offense against his fondest fictions—something called “God” and “His Commandments.” Both of which for Jacoby dovetail neatly, of course (as they did in Boston), with wonder-working American capitalism and its noble plans for you and our planet.

For Jacoby, as for the sterling lover of democracy we knew in George H.W. “Poppy” Bush, the “sin” at the heart of the Occupy Movement is nothing less than—yep—“class envy.” Isn’t it clear that if these millions of pauperized working people went out and (somewhere, somehow) got themselves “real lives”—meaning lucrative business-careers which, like those of our rightful masters, raked in profits at any cost—they’d all be peacefully at home watching TV and reading The Bible, like most good docile Americans?

“Class envy is not benign,” writeth Jeff. “At its most extreme…it unleashed the bloodiest genocides of the 20^th century.” So the Occupy movement is well on its way toward “Lenin and Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.”

Got that? If we let Occupy continue, it’s only a matter of time before they open extermination-camps for the rich. They’re going to keep instigating bad, bad things as well against those politically-neutral, friendly Finest of our communities’ protectors and servants, the police. According to Jacoby (and the highly professional New York Post), “from Boston to Berkeley, Occupy encampments have coincided with surges in vandalism, assault and theft,” not to mention sexual assault and rape—or at least this is “allegedly” so, according to Jacoby’s idea of an authority in the Post.

Does Jeff happen to mention that in New York, for example, it’s the police who are deliberately “dumping” homeless persons, drunks and mentally-disturbed people into the Occupy crowds? (The answer is no—which shows how much his Glob editors with their “family values” care about Jeff’s own fairness in getting his facts right.)

“All-night drumming”! “Public urination”! And, genocide! That’s what you get when people who actually want to be millionaires gather together and whine that they’re not fellow heirs to the fortunes of The Bush Crime Family. For Jacoby, they’re acting in defiance of the mighty 10^th Commandment: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.” And you know from your wonderful, uplifting Old Testament what happens to people who do that, and to nations who allow it.

And yet, I thought George Carlin had clarified that America thrives on breaking the mighty 10th—for where is consumerism without covetousness and envy?

You betcha! Why, for righteous comparison, Jacoby suggests, just look at those deeply dignified and articulate Tea Party rallies, whose goals were “limited government, personal responsibility, lower taxes, and economic freedom.” Nevermind the Jehovan fits of imbecilic rage. Nevermind the assault-rifles, the swastikas and “socialist!” screams aimed at people who couldn’t qualify as “commies” if their lives depended on it.

Nevermind those bankers destroying the working world’s economy with their bundles of shaky sharky loans and mortgages, their easy-credit paths to slavery (as in Greece), their outright corruption of every democratic government and problem-solving public initiative. They handed out candy-credit with a promise of growth in jobs to pay for it and then moved every job into slave-labor countries. 

Every meeting that matters now is held behind more closed doors and burly boys with bludgeons than ever before. Spinoza observed that when the people’s business is carried on that way, you can be sure it is not the people’s business getting done. And here’s what’s wrong for trusting Jeff: “What the Occupiers appear to want above all is to punish the wealthy, to demonize corporations, and to wallow in their own victimhood and sense of entitlement.”

After all, “limited government” means clearing the way for our job-creators and world-builders, who suffer so much “uncertainty” and needless interference from entities such as the EPA and OSHA—to name only two real reasons that America remains livable at all. “Uncertainty” is no longer tolerable to the addict called Profit inside business. Neither are wages, for that matter. “Personal responsibility” means that you, you peasant, will answer for your debts and crimes while banks, corporations and executives (those vanguards of anti-socialism except when they’re collecting bailouts or bonuses) operate with wholesale impunity.

“Lower taxes” means the high ideal of giving back as little as you can possibly get away with, for all your own gains based in the exploitation of public infrastructure, wealth and labor. And “economic freedom” means of course what Orwell rephrased as “the right to exploit others for profit.” It is absurd to pretend that our lives are truly decided by anything else. And that is the sickness against which we Occupy The World.

Jeff didn’t read my analysis and plan-proposal in WOOP. Hey, Jeff. Let’s make a list of the Top World Catastrophes during just the last 30 years, and see if the entity at fault in each was mainly Business or Government. When you consider also that the Public Relations industry and business-press have been explicitly inciting anti-government rage through all that time, you can see why Americans are so turned-around on the subject of what’s eating them alive. As Noam Chomsky has remarked, “The problem with government is that it’s potentially democratic.”

If you argue that a naïve fantasy called “the free market” and business (meaning, Profit) should decide all things in human life, you need to say openly that you’re in favor of being governed, from your workplace to your bedroom, by a self-sanctified private elite, who account to nobody (or what’s money for?). Them is ya choices. Poppy can’t save us anymore by waving the flag in bold psychosis and shouting “I don’t care what the facts are!”

So for cozy, pious Jeff, if you call the wealthy on their documented behavior—those who’ve done worse than nothing for America for decades as a means of enriching themselves—you want to “punish” them. After all they’ve done for you! You just forget about Jesus whipping the shit out of money-changers in the temple, you sinner there!

If you, your community and economy identify the parasite of Profit as the cause of your real and increasing suffering, you are “demonizing.” And if you say or try to do anything about the increasingly hopeless pit into which ever-wealthier and more powerful corporations are casting the vast majority of working people, you simply need to “get over it” and stop wallowing.

After all, speaketh Jacoby, nobody owes you anything—except the (unmentioned) bill that must come due for needless but profitable wars, for more tax-breaks at the high end, and for every hare-brained destructive cast of the dice in the planetary elite casino called capitalism.

Elite contempt for the very working people who feed their wealth is not, for Jeff, “class hostility.” For Jeff, a common-sense analysis of how we all get rich through each other’s contributions can come only from “class war fanatics” such as Elizabeth Warren. Jeff must have missed the Wall Street heels who took time to sip some champagne through their glib smirks as they gazed down from their balcony-eyrie over the New York Occupiers’ march.

Check me out on these documents. When I began working in the 1970s, the IRS tax-table said that if you made less than $1,050 in a year, you owed zero taxes. Since the “Reagan Revolution” de-regulated and downsized every living thing, you may notice that the IRS tax table has been quietly expanded downward to mine more wealth out of the poorest end and hand it directly to the elite.

For now, if you make five dollars in a year, you owe tax on it. There’s a real touch of national class. No “class hostility” there, no “radical redistribution of wealth”! Heavens, no! To Jacoby, the more you work and the poorer you get for it, the more you should feel inspired to work even more and thereby (somehow, someday) make America even greater!

 The Occupy movement, for Jacoby, stands in plain and doomed defiance of The Tenth Commandment’s “moral and social hygiene.” It protects us, that is, like a political and economic condom, from “innumerable other evils”—whilst in the midst of a “norm” called fucking our neighbors for a buck.

“It shouldn’t be surprising,” quoth Jacoby, “when a movement that obsesses with what rich capitalists earn, rather than with what they produce, starts treating other people’s property and persons with contempt.”

See? The man can’t help but get it backwards: after all, he follows and prays to a model of the world that’s uniquely backwards too. The Occupy movement is precisely concerned with what rich capitalists “earn and produce”—the answers being Much For Very Little, and Worse Than Nothing. Where is Jeff’s troubled spiritual conscience about that other Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal?”

Get backwards behind me, Satan! You should be “obsessed” with celebrating all that rich capitalists “produce” for everybody’s benefit. If those businessmen didn’t organize our world for us, where would we be! Answer honestly now, for Jeff’s sake: Ask yourself, Have they treated your “property and persons with contempt”?

If not, stay low. They just haven’t gotten to you yet.

Jeff say, You should be grateful, and learn from the fates of many peoples who were not—for example those unhygienic Canaanites and Philistines, who failed to recognize God’s people and his mighty-mysterious hand when good ol’ Israel came down from the Near East’s highlands to somehow, in miraculously peaceful fashion, become the lords of their already-inhabited coastal country.

No cultural or literal “genocide” about that—even if scientific archaeology is still thrashing to otherwise explain this extraordinarily-sudden transformation of that landscape. The Old Testament itself spells out what happened in copious blood. Now we’re told that while The Bible is all true, this part somehow isn’t—or, it’s like, sort of kind of, symbolical-allegorical, like. Even by that so-called argument, the “conquest of the Promised Land” is at the very least one of the ugliest wishes ever written out.

Be grateful, saith Jeff, to your masters—whose ethics, honor and industry “God” has clearly rewarded with dominion over all the Earth, and over your never-sufficient and ever-more-fruitless work-day and future. This, you understand, is a “spiritual” and “moral” argument that just happens to line a few elite pockets with cash, and your conscience with blinders, sound-proofing, and a numb-numb drug of choice.

If you can’t be grateful, at least be quiet, and invisible! For Jeff Jacoby, in his preposterous wisdom, has a Biblical dream for you. And if you don’t appreciate that, the blood-caked jowls of his Lord of Ethical History will soon be teaching you a sore lesson.

Go home, Occupiers, before you destroy us all! “With the help of God and a few policemen,” as James Joyce’s father might have said to Jeff, there’s still time to save American Profit from the wages of sin.

“If ye do not well, sin lieth at the door,” quoth Ye Scripture. You’ve got to realize that you saw Virtue itself sipping that champagne and gazing down on you, with the pleasure of a heavenly Saint Thomas Aquinas gazing into Hell.

Go home, Occupiers, be normal! Above all, watch TV! Who wants to be a millionaire? You do, if you’d just be honest with yourself. You can trust Jeff, he knows, it’s in The Bible! If you don’t know how to be normal anymore, read more Jeff Jacoby, and absorb the moral methodology by which he shamelessly shills for good ol’ American greed. You’ll find it as rigorous and uplifting as that of the Boston Puritans—whose “city on a hill” divided its time between exterminating “savages” and banishing anybody without the proper, docile, hard-working, never-covetous JudeoChristian attitude.

As a matter of fact, within a generation of those first Puritan church-communities in America, the vast majority of the population found itself “outside of the communion”—which most of all enabled your getting any share of the (colonial) wealth surrounding everybody.

Thanks, Jeff! Good job, Boastin’ Glob! And God, I hope I’ve learned my lesson.

Spirals inscribed at Newgrange, Ireland, 5000 years old

Listen to what “everyday people” say about The Afterlife. (First, of course, that there is one.) You can easily absorb a range of these short direct accounts of people’s Near-Death Experiences at YouTube, and via web-pages devoted to studying NDEs. For me, the most credible individuals are the least self-conscious, the people focused on trying to share their observations in plain speech, the non-evangelicals, and those with no book, lectures or counseling for sale.  

I see four points on which 99% of them agree. A) Your normal consciousness just keeps going when you die. B) You first encounter a completely dark “void,” a place where you feel not alone and, yet, very safe. C) “A light” appears, whose description is wholly benign for all these witnesses. And, D) We begin to communicate and/or “merge” with a being and/or beings who do not judge, but absolutely accept and welcome us, to a place that almost everyone calls “home.”

For contrast and perspective, here up-front is my own bottom line of direct observation—and it’s a blank. My closest NDE was a scuba-diving accident. I “drowned” so fast underwater that I simply blacked out, until I found people reviving me face-up on the beach. The last thing I saw was the sea-bottom’s grainy sand up against my mask, and one instant later (with absolute nothing in-between), someone was ripping the hairs out of my chest as they unzipped the wet-suit. According to a man there who previously had seen people drown, the colors I turned before reviving were those of someone definitely dead. To me that interval was utterly unconscious, a blank of nonexistence. 

Yet, that is not quite the bottom line. For in my experiences near death—namely, helping and holding the hands of my elders as they passed through the gates of this life, and in losses of family and friends—I have had profoundly empowering experiences beyond the normal. Moments of liberating learning that I’ll take to my grave and that correlate with independent others.

If you want to cleanse your eyes or even your soul of the things in this life that are really of no account, embrace your life’s share of these experiences with everything you have. May this offering say why.

***

Here are two conceptions of “this life and beyond” that have kept on resonating for me through years of study. In their lights—given that we of The West have such an amazingly positive non-Biblical heritage—I think it’s pathetic that we still only really bond around the needless tragedies of war and natural catastrophe. Maybe someday we’ll wonder why our barriers come down only when violence and terror smash through them. We’ll ask what has been blinding us to the fact that we need each other. Someday our terminal boredom with fearing and celebrating death will give way to celebrations of life—and we’ll find ourselves back in the arms of our most honorable ancestors.

Speaking first as a scholar of Minoan (Bronze Age) Crete, the clues suggest to me that they conceived of a gateway or door between this life in nature and whatever lies beyond it. Their “horns of consecration” marked threshold-places between the mundane and the sacred. The horned mountain was the house of their ancestors, and its horns marked the horizons of the mysteries that flank this life: where we come from and where we go. In-between, their experience of life was cyclical—a “dynamic steady state” rooted in the harmony of past and present being.

The Minoans’ door to The Beyond was simultaneously in that mountain, and at the almost-unmoving center of their night sky (the Pole Stars). They inscribed it at the central point of their wheeled crosses and spirals—the latter a path of concentric circles that, like a door, functions in two directions. The dead pass in and the being-born pass out.

If I have earned any learning as an historian of Native New England civilizations, I’ve seen a central similar thing in the way Native American traditions describe life as circles within circles. Human being happens within the cycles going on all around it. Say and pretend what we will about life’s linear goals, our life is written in overlapping cycles of interdependent forms.

We are born from our ancestors as they were born in turn, utterly helpless. Each generation matures because their elders’ lives, at peak-strength, have what it takes to help us. Then, as we rise into our places, they decline—becoming helpless again. When that circle closes, our own turns come at the front of the line. We for a time inscribe the spiral-path that circles out from and back toward the door. Behind us rise the young, both displacing us and (we hope) our own best help in what is coming in our turn. Their times too will come to engender and to fade.

I’ve come to consider those paradigms more credible than others because of their naturalistic terms. So along such lines I try to learn from a journey with my father—when I was determined to hold his hand all the way through the last turns of the circles of his life, as he headed through the door.

***

Jack was roaring healthy when he died—a fit, robust and sparky Irishman two days short of his 70^th birthday (January 23, 1922-1992). What got him was a gradual form of myeloma or bone marrow cancer. The doctors had promised my father maybe three years and, with plenty of transfusions and suffering too, he fought it for nine. He and we enjoyed the hell out of this life together before the end. It’s only true that the shadow bearing down on Jack was already lighting up the way we lived, as soon as it appeared.  

A slowly-progressing terminal illness divests a person day by day of their independence. Each of Jack’s hard-forced surrenders of his were the workaday ways of circling and spiraling in toward the gate and door, the horizon of this life. In Jack’s case, that turned out to be the local hospital where I had been born to him and my mother (1955).

What he wanted most was to pass away at home, in the home he had built and cared for every day of his family life. But the best choice at that time was that he let the hospital manage his last days of searing pain. So I watched Jack walk knowingly out the door of his home for the last time, still quite lucid then with his usual grave and merry Irish mix, and not one curse or tear. And then I was setting up a cot beside his bed in his hospital room, with no idea or care about how long I was going to live there. It turned out to be three days. He died on my birthday, and the day on which we waked him (in his golf-clothes and shoes) was his own.

***

Thanks to the hospital, that first night we wheeled in a TV with a VCR and spent two hours watching the very first print of Thomas Morton—my first documentary-film just completed at that time, and dedicated to him at the end of the long credits. My insecure and impecunious life as a writer, it’s true, had been a great worry and mystery to my father. But that film, for all its flaws, showed him that at least I had wasted my life on real substance. Jack said he was glad to think that a story of a good guy wronged was going to get told—and he smiled when he heard that I had plans for the stories of more guys a lot like that.

In the middle of the second night, Jack awoke not in any kind of distress, but suddenly very lucid and animated, eager to wake me beside him and to talk. Whatever my sleep-deprived watchman’s state, I sat up the more as I listened.

 It has to be said that morphine was part of this mixture—the wonder-drug for pain, which over time brings on delusions and psychosis. You also have to know that this was a man born of hard knocks in The Great Depression, schooled in World War II, trained and employed all his life to install New England Telephones, and without either college or one evangelical bone in his body. Jack was a “worrier” because from supporting his family at 12 years old to making sure that he and his crewmates came back from every combat-mission, he had built his good world out of taking complete responsibility for it.

Popular culture Jack enjoyed, but he certainly put no time into existential exotica, let alone NDEs. I knew my father for 37 years (my lucky number, by the way) and never before had he spoken along lines of any resemblance to the following.

Jack said he had no idea where all this came from. He’d just simply “found himself” in a place or space that he could only describe as a kind of dark void, a completely featureless nowhere, if there could be one. Then, seemingly above him, a light appeared. It seemed high and far away, but it grew brighter, and then as far as Jack could tell, it was descending, slowly, gently down toward him. In the next moment, he was being spoken to by “people” or beings whose arrival and presences he never explained or visually described.

“We are going to take care of you,” they said to him. “You do not need to worry about any little thing in the whole world.” Those were the two sentences Jack remembered, and then he struggled—but there in his bed, he made me understand him. Everything about that place and what was said to him convinced my father, like nothing else in his life, that there was not one single thing to worry in the universe.

“And you, by the way—You got a lot of balls,” he smiled. And this with half a wry look, as if admitting he might have missed something.

“What?” I said, amid amazement.

“You know. Doing the things you do,” my father answered. “They said so.”

 They? We laughed and laughed.

***

Early in the dark of the third morning, Jack awoke thrashing in his bed. It was a real morphine panic, a dread of falling or sinking, of letting go. All at once he wanted and could not bear to lie down, to sit up, to stand, or anything else. For every bit of his nurses’ dedication, all they might be able to do was strap him down. Instead I held my father tight in my arms, telling him who I was, just talking and helping him to breathe until he grew calm again.

By then all Jack wanted to know was that he was safe and with somebody who loved him. When he felt and knew that for sure, he wanted to lie back down in the bed.

His head was so heavy, so weary, on my shoulder. Just before we opened our embrace, he pressed a kiss into my neck below my ear, and whispered the last thing he said.

“God bless you Jack.”

At that moment, and every time I’ve remembered it since, what cracked my spirit open like a seed was the presence of a circle. Because I’d been blessed already, all my life, with him as my father.

That same day’s afternoon, I was sitting up next to his bed where he slept with my hand holding his. Skilled, scarred, patient, weathered, beaten-up, infinitely gentle, his hand was cool and growing mottled, his breathing slow and shallow.

The telephone on the night-table rang. It startled Jack’s eyes wide-open, and he looked into mine. Then he laid back, and the light left his eyes.

You can let go of a hand. But hold one in closely helping somebody along those circles toward the door, and through it, and you never lose what begins to pour through you in the process. For that I have only the clumsiest of gropings toward words.

Rocket-fuel. The full-fire plasma of Life. The geometrically-bursting dynamo of evolutionary ecstasy in every cell inside and all around me. The balls to settle for nobody’s measures but my own.

Let me try for the terms of a benign journeyman. Just don’t get in my fuckin’ way with your life-killing projects for money and “progress” and your infantile prayers for redeemers and armageddons. My holy inherited soul will walk up your face and, down your back, leave a spiral-trail carved in natural facts.

For The Garden, you see, is remembering we are in it. Free, unafraid and for living, I’m home, and on my way. I sit down at my desk and go flying, bodily, through the universe. You know what I’m saying? Kiss my entire ass, although friendship and kindness are good options too. I got this tender ferocity for nothing from my ancestors, so surely I owe someone ahead at least the same.

Stand yourself in the doorway and see what happens to the obstacles around your life-craving soul. We don’t conquer death. We learn how to laugh in its face before death laughs in ours.

People are dangerous (free) when they know they cannot lose. Feeling this, honey-child, means that we’ve already won.

***

This article is in loving memory of my little brother, Joseph David Dempsey, who died at age 12 on this day in 1969. The post-mortem report from Boston Children's Hospital states the cause: one simple little break in a plastic tube of the heart-lung machine that was sustaining Joey through open-heart surgery.

Here, my friends, is an invitation to really get to know what our forefathers went through in one theatre of World War II—namely the young men of the Fifteenth Air Force’s 464th Bomb Group, whose B-24 Liberator crews flew harrowing missions day after day into Hitler’s Third Reich.

This new web page features dozens of rare photographs and original documents about their experiences from start to finish—including a filmed interview with Staff Sgt. Clarence “Red” Eudaily, the original Flight Engineer of my father’s first air crew. Together one day in August 1944 over the oil refineries of Pardubice, Czechoslovakia, my father and Red Eudaily performed acts of heroism together that saved their aircraft and brought them both the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Their stories are both hair-raising and inspiring—So, come and explore!

http://ancientlights.org/fifteenth.html

Yours truly,

Dr. Jack Dempsey

Nose-gunner Jack Dempsey (right), Flight Engineer Red Eudaily (left) and a crew-friend with 'Pistol Packin' Mama" of the 15th AAF/464th Bomb Group, at Pantanella, Italy 1944. The photo from my father's collection is the only one of "Mama" with gaping holes from German flak.

We the Workers of the World

WALK  OUT  ON  PROFIT 

Sincerely Proposed, If Seemingly Preposterous

*

‘The secret of happiness is freedom,

and the secret of freedom, courage.’

Thucydides

*

The empire of Profit has come round-the-world home—to “reduce,” colonize and impoverish every last working person on the planet. This means you.

It’s time to get real with the same intensity as Profit. Our human equality is outflanked by an economy whose core mechanism and values undermine law and democracy, big and small. The systemic motto has always been Profit At Any Cost. Now it qualifies also as an ecological cancer killing Earth.

Don’t know what to do? Do nothing, play the game, and what we call life (freedom) has little chance of survival—let alone of thriving, as it should—because Profit increasingly builds its advantages around and against the world’s human ideals.

We defeat ourselves each day in the very terms by which we work—in the fine print of Profit, which tells us there is no other choice.

My aim on this Labor Day 2011 is to ask you to realize and act on fact. We are not trapped.

The value of our daily work is what Profit must have. The place where we work is the central point of power to make change happen. Our power is always already in our hands. No one can take it away from us, unless we allow it.

WOOP (in 5000 words) proposes a sustained local and worldwide cooperative action to reclaim the value of our work, and for the creation of a work-based economy of equals.

A quick poll at the bottom here poses a key question. And I hope you’ll read through before you’re finally certain of your answer.

***

Find the act that reclaims the real power of your own work, help others to do so in that act, and working people win. On Earth there is no greater power than every person’s share of work—when we bring it together.

That is the soul of WOOP: informed, nonviolent, connected and courageously human workers walking out on Profit, and into a world of genuine equals—because of the integrity of each life’s daily work (pulling your weight in the world).

Beyond that burden—which is actually half or less of what you work now every day—each of us knows how to live our own happiness in a heritage of common freedom.

By freedom, I mean no more or less than doing what you want to do with most of each living day, doing no harm. By work, I mean tasks you might not do if life were a fully-free ride, without demands for survival and a sense of self-respect about pulling your weight. I feel sure you’d choose a work-week of 20 hours over the present 40-plus, if we could work it out. We can, but something’s in the way. Let’s go to the root of what profit means.

Please note—Profit is a practice, not a person. There is no reason to demonize, compel, or harm anybody. A Profiteer is addicted to Profit. An addiction is that which you cannot keep from doing, no matter how harmful, in spite of reason. Profit like addiction must always have more. Willfully unconscious to consequences, it cannot help but destroy.

WOOP presents nothing to believe in, and nothing to tear down except one addictive illusion—that the work we each do, one day at a time, rightly makes us un-equals in the world economy.

***

If others’ deprivations must be part of your rewards for work, reconsider. If you think you’ll lose your motive to work hard, produce excellence and be creative when everybody has the same access to the stores, read on.

If you think your work is harder or “worth more” than what others contribute, and that you should get exclusive privileges and rewards for it, please observe that A) Nobody can work more than one day at a time; and, B) You chose your work. I feel sure that you don’t see yourself as a martyr for the world’s well-being, that you wouldn’t want to “obligate” anyone else into acts or situations against their will because of choices you made for yourself.

 Here’s the essential WOOP challenge:

1) Act to recognize and prove the equal value of your and all others’ work; 2) Do your work well in half the compulsory time each week; and, 3) Instead of a paycheck (which now proves that you worked this week), take home an employer-certified card like the current ATM-type—which henceforth gives you equal access to anything in the store of worldwide production.

There’s no need for a nanny-state or “new world order” computer-chip in your skin. WOOP works with the standing local and macro-systems that we have—including the world’s best-ever chance to create real justice, The Constitution of the United States. We only need to change the engine’s core program, the reason and values by which we participate in every day of work.

***

Open stores! Yes, people will go crazy at first, for awhile.

Yet, what happens with almost every thing we acquire? We want it, work for it, get it, enjoy it, and then the glow and the thrill wear off—especially as we see others also having it.

Thanks to the sexy, power-soaked mirages of Profit’s public relations industry, it’s often too late in life when we realize that things don’t mean very much. People who wake up feel they have quit an addiction: I wanted, I got, I grew bored, and then I wanted more. That’s all Profit really has to offer—life as a rat turning Profit’s wheel, kept docile with rations, terror, bribe-sweets, and shiny objects.

Question: If living already makes it clear that the one real thing is how we cultivate and share ourselves—whether we live out the potentials of being human and free in our own ways—shouldn’t we be living those values now?

Would you go crazy with greed in a world of open stores after WOOP? Or is it just “other people” who’d spoil it for everybody?

A life is both unique and meaningful in the web of life because of its relationships with others. An equal day’s work enables them all to live in their million ways. Instead, we’ve been living and toiling under a myth that you produce your daily excellence only if you’re driven by competitive fear; in a competition whose goal is either unspeakable or unknown. No good hustler states his goal aloud, and no truly representative “leader” can be incapable of stating it, since the people they represent have said it first.

Work by the vast majority of people on Earth makes your life work every day, as yours does theirs. Why would most people suddenly let you down if their work brought them anything you can have?

***

We already prove our power with each day of work. Yet in return we receive less freedom, more poverty. If that is the (delusionary, backwards) case, is it not more realistic to expect real and better results from the actual power of working people’s acts together—where we are, with what we have and do?

What is more real (effective) than your work? Consider that, although constantly robbed, you still have your full value for leverage—tomorrow’s good day’s work.

Let’s take hold of a 10-year time frame. Ordinary planetary citizen-observer that I am, I have ironic confidence that WOOP will achieve its goal sooner than anything promised by world-class governments and global business, for our last 10 years of dedication and sacrifice to war and Profit.

WOOP takes back the freedom your real work creates.

***

Take perspective from a fundamental fact about human work. Anthropological science reports that “primitive hunter-gatherers” spend perhaps 15-20 hours a week at the work of meeting existential needs for food, clothing and shelter. On that basis they do whatever they like for the other 12 hours a day (with a good 8 hours’ sleep besides).

Yet, we of the “advanced” world, surrounded by work-savers and conveniences, work three times as long per week in exchange for far less (and decreasing) free time.

Why? What citizen of an advanced free society or economy would choose such a change in life’s requirements?

Economics is the big word for our daily direct exchange of work and value, which should be making well-being and freedom more of an actuality for everyone. Something is in the way (doubling-and-more the time we “have to” work)—so much so that we work in the opposite direction.

***

PROFIT

Your work (a product, a service) is a value you create and deliver in exchange for things produced by the work of other people. The value of work is its real power (from your time, strength, skill and sweat) to accomplish and contribute something. With billions of others you make the world work, exchanging work for “value-ables” produced by everybody else.

Work is a formula: Something For Something. See you tomorrow. I do not have to like you, or be like you. You worked, I worked. Now we share an equal right to receive from the world and its “store” that we created. It’s one day at a time for everybody. No one can do their job without help from others.

Something For Something works as a formula because, fundamentally, we recognize the value of each other’s contribution to another successful planetary day.

Profit, on the other hand, is by definition Something For Nothing.

Consult your Oxford English Dictionary, the multi-volume work of impeccable etymology from which all other English lexicons derive.

What you find is that profit signifies value gained from an exchange that you in no way put into the exchange. Profit, by definition, signifies an unequal exchange of value.

You profit when you take more than you give. No mountain of expert economic theory changes this.

***

After all, value that you take beyond what you put in cannot come from nowhere. Behind every dollar of Profit is the other guy with a shrinking stack of dimes. Somehow, by hook and crook, Profit derives from somebody else’s work and value.

The earliest uses of profit in English speak to its injustice. Here’s one of the very first (O.E.D. 1466): “A private profit hurts and harms a common well-being.” The editors of the O.E.D. were not social activists, or imagining a quaint organic merry old England.

Profit has a cousin tangled in among its root-words—“advantage,” which of course is a relative term. Nothing from nothing. There can be no “advantage” to one side without a dis-advantage to someone else.

Advantage is part of the profit family because it tries to signify the real-world value of what somebody gains by this corruption of exchange.

With advantages come more profits. More profits, more advantages; and ever-on, more injustice, resentment and destruction, until most people have nothing and a few control everything.

***

Where we are is only what Profit was long “designed” to accomplish and produce. Nature and human beings are inconsequent “externalities” to Profit’s formula.

This was precisely Profit’s original policy. It was nurtured in late-medieval Europe under the bad sign of Biblical Monogenesis: a sanctified grand delusion stating that only “we” (the insiders to Profit) matter, as the planetary Chosen of “God Himself.” Its means and ends were openly declared in documents sacred and secular as the rest of the still-unknown planet rolled into the view of a predatory Europe—which had gone bankrupt because of its Crusades. The one same murderous hustle goes round and round.

Discover for yourself the full original horrifying language that blessed the new gentleman-conquistadors in Francis Jennings’ The Invasion of America. The plan in their words was to force “perpetual slavery and profit” out of anything alive “discovered” outside the crazy loop. 

From these roots—a delusion of “free unlimited natural wealth belonging to no creature that matters”—comes the spiraling destruction that so resembles addiction. (Like capitalism, it really got started when Europe took up American tobacco.) Chambers of Commerce and conventional historians erected monuments around a third word connected with the tangled roots of profit, speaking of its increasingly pathological centuries as progress.

Changing a healthy planet filled with independent peoples into a poisoned one with a disadvantaged majority in 500 years cannot be progress. But it certainly was by the Profit and Advantage of a few.

And from this, the Advantaged claim no inherited advantages?

***

No surprise that unequal, unfair exchange creates resentment. Profit corrupts and exploits the basic relationship in the midst of our real working lives.

Profit attacks the real equality of work when it assigns different top-to-bottom values for each kind of it. Thus, you may take from “the store” only according to the value that a self-interested somebody else assigned to your work, in the numbers on your paycheck.

Those numbers do not reflect the full value of the work done. They are cooked, by Profit’s interests “above” you on the pyramid, and cooked according to yet another preposterously-unsustainable principle: Give As Little And Take As Much As You Can Get Away With.

So, ironically—or rather, according to the illogic of Profit—the higher you go, the less real productive work gets done (as if only certain people are smart enough to make big decisions); and yet, the higher the number that measures your access to all that gets produced. The more people you give nothing, the greater your rewards. Again we arrive at a backwards description of work’s real world. We know it has to collapse.

Lies and violence (24/7, now) make this seem to work. Like the scam of a hustler who’s got your money, it only needs to “work” one day at a time until you’re dead. As another money motto puts it: In every exchange, there’s a loser. If you’re wondering who that is, it’s you.

***

As one “dynamic young entrepeneur” actually said in a business-news interview, “In an ideal world, you pay people nothing.” Do we get it yet, that these are the “values” of Profit? Look at the Profit addicts squatting on their trillions—collecting interest, making credit scarce and costly, and workers more desperate. Do we get it yet, that Profit (by its own business-periodical admission) is no longer interested in America’s future? That Profiteers have just about had it with the idea of paying wages at all?

Sure—It’s fundamental that workers with money to spend drive the demand that creates more jobs, more growth. And since when does an addict care about reality and consequences? In the first place, nothing in nature grows forever, not a star, not a cell. Unlimited growth is a 2-word way to say “cancer.” Second—Why pay people (and tarnish those record profits) when it’s so much easier to squeeze them down into an ideal abject servitude?

If one quarter’s Profit has 10 years of consequences, so what? It’s crazy-time again. For no investment in the world pays back more than education: the average is $14 out for every $1 in, a profit margin unheard-of in any other enterprise. And yet education (our most crucial investment) is precisely the last of Profit’s plans.

If Profit is such a rational proposition, why do we keep finding ourselves ass-backwards when we try to study it closely in the contexts of known facts and observable common realities? No wonder our heads spin with trying to figure out what’s happening to us. Economically, the most advantageous kind of worker to employ is in fact an educated one. And yet according to Profit’s own clear priorities, somehow education is suspect—perhaps as an investment uniquely unlikely to produce more Advantages for the Advantaged.

We look back, around and forward, we look here and there. And once we understand what Profit is (a delusion that drives injustice), the clues and pieces rush together toward a realization. The daily aim of  our present arrangement and the goal of this “progress” is an ignorant, docile labor-force without memory or hope—captive, self-policing and asleep on an eternal wheel of production and consumption. To the benefit of an exclusive few.

People who live delusions and denials must either adjust to reality, or start forcing the world to resemble their delusions. The latter state is psychosis, meaning blind obsessive omni-destruction of self and surroundings. The addiction to Profit is now so intense that it’s devouring even its own functional basis (educated workers with money and fruitful skills). We live the consequences, while Profit goes on with a feast and a danse-macabre deep in its fortified fantasy-casino.

Only one thing measures the mastery of an addiction. You stop doing it. Profit never will stop on its own. The point of power, the nonviolent solution is on our end, in our hands, right in front of us—Stop Participating. Stop feeding the addiction. Walk out on a specious “rational selfishness,” which has reigned instead as the tragically-crazy father of public progress—outstripping progress with a walking nightmare history of needless slave-toil and destruction.

Archimedes said, “Give me the right fulcrum-point on which to rest my lever, and I can move the world.” Our individual day’s work is that point, and WOOP is the lever in our hands.

We who really work together are reality. Profit cannot survive without our work.

***

Right now, when the disadvantaged reach for resources beyond Profit’s false reductive value of their work, its combined advantages called Power act to stop them. So, as we consider WOOP action, let’s remember:

We have a standing system of law and order to back up the values we choose for our economic system. Law enforcement will also work after Profit to protect us (but in new ways, too) from the pathologically selfish and the irredeemably stupid.

Right now you cannot take from an ATM unless you have put value into it. After Profit, you won’t need an ATM. You’ll just go to the store with the card that proves you pulled your planetary weight at work this week (that’s what your paycheck certifies now, nothing more is necessary)—and meet your needs with your dignified good looks.

***

Respect the work of others as your own, and the world is yours, because it’s everybody’s. You and they produced it.

You can even still imagine that you’re better.

Maybe you think a world without Profit will make “everybody the same.” Does that mean You will no longer be You, if other people who work their best day enjoy equal rewards? What will happen to this You?

Can it be that without the ranked rewards rationed out by Profit, you’d have no cause to develop or distinguish yourself? Without those, no pride, no talents, no motive to work hard—no urge to create, no reason to do the dirty, dull or dangerous work?

Maybe you see no fit reward for what you do except special advantages, which other people (in your opinion) have not earned with their same day’s work.

Who promised that if you worked hard, others would be denied many things as part of your reward? Surely, you see the needless and odious injustice in such a proposition? Why, then, do we live according to it?

I assume you’re reading this in part because you want to understand your own real daily values more clearly. Confident in your values, you’re not afraid to hear about others. Please, then, articulate the criteria by which you form your opinion that others don’t deliver the same day’s work and value.

If you never have, or find that you really can’t, the criteria must be Profit’s.

It’s usually the advantaged who see, in the mirror, justice and/or a merit system working just fine (under them) in a legitimate republic. Plato (whose name in demotic Greek meant “Fatso”) wanted everybody trained for war, and trained to war as the measure of human virtue, while banishing the poets. The grotesquely pot-bellied Saint Thomas Aquinas described a chief pleasure of The Blessed to enjoy in his kind of Heaven: looking down into Hell.

If you find that you want to quit your work when there are no special rewards (beyond your own equal access to everything), quit.

Pull your weight with honor another way, where you really belong, as yourself and as part of something greater. That’s where it’s at for both real living and real respect. There always will be people who want the tough and crazy work.

WOOP is a way to live for new reasons, truly yours.

***

WOOP ESSENTIALS

WOOP is a simple, long-planned, world-synchronized, sustained nonviolent action to A) demonstrate the power and value of our own and each other’s daily work, and B) make clearly visible the values of Profit that stand in the way of global human being.

Recognized or not, there are already millions of people who reject Profit’s consequences and work together to meet each other’s needs without profit or slavery of any kind. Real economies of barter, shared currencies of nonprofit exchange, third-party credit and direct credit clearing are just a few ongoing creations and methods. We already have what we need worldwide to walk out on the core-problem in our common human way. We are closer than Profit wants us to realize.

From websites and social media to local meetings and every familiar means of organizing, the first WOOP DAY and each to come would be long prepared-for and coordinated.

For example, let’s choose May 1^st—beginning at the local moment around the world when every working person completes one-half of their normal work-day shift. We might choose 12:00 noon Greenwich Mean Time for the very first action, and then watch the wave of them happen in turn around the world.

OK—So what would a WOOP action do?

After a solid half-day of your best work, you walk out of your work-place, and lift both your arms out high. Then what?

Whatever you want to do, harming no one. What makes you feel happy and free.

“See you tomorrow!” And, you mean it—because, as you’ve clearly explained to your employer, you’re proud to pull your weight in the world, and proud to work hard earning your share of it. Most people already know they can do their job’s real work in half the hours.

This is not a strike. We’re never coming back to the work-place of Profit.

***

What if I’m the only one? What if I just get fired? How would I survive on a cut to half my present wages, if that’s how “Boss” responded? They’d cancel my health-care, too!

Such would be Profit’s first demonstration of its values.

In all these cases, you’d have the cooperative support of other people through this action—friends working for the same goal, helpers and professionals of all kinds. People will survive far longer than Profit can, once WOOP truly begins to starve out its addiction to our work.

Between the cracks of Profit we already see the working rudiments, from food co-ops to health care. Unlike the “progress” that has ruled for 500 years, WOOP has a clear unifying goal and a recognizable end.

Think of the cooperation and sacrifice we have laid on the mystical altar of Progress By Profit. If Profit never has never aloud defined the goal by which alone we can measure Progress, do you think it can, wants to, or will?

Imagine what that much courage could do in a cause that is openly clear, realistic and honorable. We help each other already, and more every day without “business.” Probably half the true world economy now is off the books. (Like the wars.) If you know your long-term goal, you keep each problem in perspective.

Let’s use a question to see what might happen and what resources we’d have:

If everybody clearly knew WOOP’s values, purposes and goals, how many people out of 10 at your work-place would participate?

***

If you’ve explored this far, it might be safe to assume that there’s you and one other person. 2 out of 10 doesn’t sound like much impact. Wouldn’t Profit swat them like flies?

It would try, except that 2 of every 10 workers on the planet are equal to the value of 20 percent of a day’s world economy. Repeat around the world for even 3 of 5 business days.

Do you think Profit would notice a drop like that?

I suggest that its effect would shake the planet—some with fear and outrage, and the many with the staggering realization that our labor actually runs the world.

The next great circle of time-shifts among all the planet’s working people brings about another WOOP. Maybe this time, it’s 3 people out of every 10. Respect for real courage goes a long way.

Perhaps the terror-tactic of wholesale firings has begun. But now, Profit has to get 30-percent more out of each remaining worker to protect those margins. If they don’t measure up, they too get fired and cut loose. Business knows that replacement-workers measure up even less often.

Yesterday’s rulers have nowhere to go but more Profiteering, more compulsion, more work, more fear, more force. Because that always was Profit’s response against anybody outside the colonial walls—which now confront and threaten to close around the planet.

Instead and forever, we are walking out from the midst of those walls. They work toward a fascist fantasy of closing everybody in. Yet, we control the gate. The doorway to real living is our work. We walk in to pull our weight, and out to live our lives.

“Look, Boss, I do not produce my daily excellence because I’m competing with China. Competing for what, an empire of control in the refrigerator market? Boss, WOOP is also about your working less and your share of everything we make.”

A servant’s life and a Profit’s pittance for the world?

***

As WOOP days go on, the people still too frightened to share in it are not only working more and harder. They see that fired or penalized WOOP participants are not just surviving, but living different lives.

Some WOOP participants might succeed in arranging their new 4-5 hours a day of first-rate work. For WOOP’s duration they’d be more enabled to help its goals come true. Some might cunningly enjoy a picnic and, in all their degenerate fascist communism, play volleyball outside the work-plant’s windows. There’s food and music and a market of planetary skills and values going on.

Maybe 1 more worker eventually walks out.

Soon it’s 4 of every 10 workers. Almost half. And thanks to Profit’s own irrationality, the replacement-workers were already living lives more crushed than the regular trained workers. Replacements work for desperate money where their hearts and their best never are.

The world machine and its profits down-spike in every register. The Profit addicts are getting restless. And what can they do? Call out the police and the army, so that citizens keep working on the old terms at bayonet-point?

Will they set up road-blocks so participating doctors can’t see people who are ill? Interdict every sharing of some work or a hot meal? On the basis of what law? No Sharing?

Sooner than later, Profit wants to bargain. WOOP replies that Profit is over, and that every working person is welcome to the feast.

See you at work tomorrow?

There’s no political argument like a festival. Joy. Freedom based in our honest cooperative work.

***

Profit begins a campaign against WOOP as an action by sex-crazed terrorist-communists with unspeakable consequences for property and the children. The world regime that “fights terror” with criminal armies unleashes new divisions of divisive spin-doctors. Every kind of slur, provocative agent, and fear about the loss of “our values and way of life” gets deployed—to defend the Haves against the Have-Nots, Who Now Realize They Can Have Anything By Equal Work.

WOOP is simply the normal daily display of a working person’s responsible freedom. Profit is a vampire that withers in sunshine. It has nowhere honorable or desirable to go. The more Profit and capitalism deploy and display their true character, the more people walk out and join in the feast of life.

They know how to work with honor and they prove it cooperatively every day. But work isn’t everything, any more than Profit ever was.

As people said one morning in that iron-clad, inevitable, best-of-all-possible-worlds dreadnaught, the U.S.S.R.:

“Sorry, Boss, it’s over, and we’re not going to die. We’re going to live, all of us.”

This time we know where we’re going.

***

If we can mount 10 years of useless world war for so little that can’t be done by wiser means, we can do this and arrive at someplace real, because work is real. Groups of workers displaced by Profit tool up factories and services old and new, each person signing up for a kind of work they like. People with existing skills earn their weekly “access card” for awhile by teaching displaced people a new desired part in the economy. WOOP participants who once issued paychecks handle the cards, and their negotiability grows with every work-place linked into the action.

People displaced by a world without Profit, those whose sole work was to generate, track and promote it, also find new ways to pull their weight. Bankers, credit card companies and more—yes, WOOP means a great deal of displacement. But look at the world and see how many truly useful tasks need to get done. Displacement that leads to a more desirable life is far better than the dead-end kind so glibly handed out to millions of people now under Profit.

There’s no need for a sudden 50-percent loss of crucial services. As law enforcement and fire departments and schools begin to take part in WOOP actions, there will be more demand for new people to learn and take on those roles in shorter shifts.

Health care shortage? Half of the patients now in offices, hospitals and facilities do not need to be there. They are there out of learned or concocted dependencies that feed untold trillions into Profit.

The world is full of people who’d work like slaves to become genuine doctors and health care workers. Do you think there’s a reason why “the best economic system ever in the world” maintains a worldwide shortage of staff, medicines and treatments, while millions die? Nothing profits (or kills) like artificial scarcity.

WOOP’s goal is the opposite: real plenitude.

Nothing would really change, except the reason for being alive each day. You’d have, in the now, what Profit can and will only promise till it’s too late for you to protest that you’ve been defrauded.

You compete with cheap labor by becoming cheaper labor. Till now, social and labor movements have bargained with Profit and keep on losing. For Profit laughs in the face of protests and strikes, marches and movements that never address the core problem. Advantage finds a way around reform.

WOOP is not reform, but a permanent walk-out. We walk out on that name consumer bestowed by Profit’s public relations, and walk forward as real world citizens. We who work are the power to say, So will it be. We need to walk.

A few best doubts, and a closing grateful for your thoughtful time.

***

This work derives from long observation, from 5 years of trying to put it into words, and from every possible wide-open dialogue I could instigate on a WOOP mechanism of change. I hope that along the way I’ve spoken to reasons to be dubious of WOOP. Perhaps there are many or fatal problems invisible to my own share of human blind-spots, and I welcome your assistance. (Progress means some fool stuck their neck out.) For example:

“If mortgages and all kinds of debts from owning things no longer existed—if the only debt we’d each owe is a solid day’s work—how could I change my life out of this present slum-apartment and dead job to someplace desirable, without new injustice toward anyone?”

I only know that the world after WOOP won’t manifest overnight. That humans are endlessly creative negotiators and builders. And, that a new economy truly based on filling human needs would at least be working in that direction—instead of Profit’s. The difference is key to getting there.

A few more possible problems:

“As you said, Advantage always finds a way around reform. Some people will still control everything.”

How, precisely, when they no longer control the people who produce? And to what end? Having more than full access to the world? WOOP is certain to expose and confront many kinds of illegitimate power.

WOOP actions shower daylight on the corruptions of our equality great and small. Like schoolyard bullies outflanked and faced down at last, most tyrants fold, their cruelty and fake powers suddenly useless.

“Too many people now avoid real work (pulling their weight) quite successfully. They’d never answer as to whether or not they worked. Too many would still find ways to cheat.”

At the same time, too many people never earned their cynicism, never truly gave themselves or others an action’s chance for finding out differently.

At the least, a world after Profit would simplify what we now call law enforcement and justice. A world after WOOP is not utopia.

Compared with Profit-servitude, it will only seem that way.

***

Lastly, something about the image (doubled) at the start.

It’s a small statue from the first days of Egypt before there were Pharaohs. From a time when culture and religion were in love with nature, and the highest social value was harmony. That world gave us the word ecstacy: it means standing “beyond yourself,” face to face with the cosmos or the living and meaningful universe. Eternity now in wheels of seasons and circles of generations without end.

The Garden (or if you prefer, The Kingdom of The Lord) is remembering that we are in it.

That gesture we still see at a moment of triumph, in stadiums too when thousands do “the wave”—a human being proudly lifts their arms in a kind of cosmic hail. WOOP is a wave of workers’ power going round the world.

Think of how many aspects of human being it expresses: celebration of being alive, bold strength, inter-acknowledgment, prayer, appeal, fulfillment, gratitude, embrace, affirmation, exhilarated joy. In fact this gesture also relates to human families across real time, from ancestors to children—and, to rebirth and resurrection.

Profit was never designed to facilitate those things. Whatever its claimed intent, all around its trickle-down mixed results, Profit has worked against them in favor of itself.

That reveling figure, the spirit in the body rising, goes well with a Woop! aloud. For the capital enemy of Profit is true satisfaction.

This I’d make the basis for WOOP’s sign of worldwide solidarity. From a human past to a present and future worthy of our ancestors’ vision, courage, sacrifice, and luminous joy.

Old signs, new meanings. Prototype for a WOOP symbol? As I see it---Earth and Today poised in a delicate balance on the peak of our world's "ancestral mountain": our living home, aligned in harmony with rhythms of the lunar-solar cosmos. The mountain is Yesterday, the circle is Now, the crowning points Tomorrow. If the "W" stands for Work, Workers and WOOP like a gesture of reaching out, the crown of it all is Free Imagination, with upraised arms or open wings. Curious---do you also see a doubled human gesture, a child exultant on a parent's shoulders?

***

“Play the game,” winks Profit, “and you’ll be alright.” Profit, Advantage and Power fool us every day, till they walk away laughing from another sucker’s grave. Nothing is more sure than our own and the planet’s turn unless we act, all together now, for change.

What I most believe is that You believe in the value of your life. That you have the hands-on power you say you cannot find. And, that a life beyond Profit is our best individual chance to show the world what we’ve really got inside.

It’s in your working hands. Only you, each day, can surrender your value.

Play the game, and you end up playing games.

One thing you can say for Profit—It means business. Profit is deadly serious.

You?

***

PLEASE TAKE THE QUICK POLL!!!

(NOTE: If you vote “Other,” comment to say what that means!)

***

Who cares how they died? It’s how they lived that matters.

A Germany-based production company has just (August 2011) released online streaming of its pseudo-new “Atlantis” documentary, featuring high-tech animations of the catastrophic destruction that engulfed the Bronze Age Aegean (you know, where Western civilization began with about 1500 years of relative peace and general prosperity). I wish I had the link for you, but threw it away in a fit of mental health. For an agglutinated slew of sea-sick examples from this genre, visit YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyDEOuAO2OU .

This particular program features the well-regarded Dr. Floyd McCoy, who really does understand what happened at Thera and makes it clear. But Good Lord, will the well-funded mainstream (History Channel, Discovery, Learning Channel, PBS, National Geographic and more) ever get tired of this virtually-worthless catastrophe approach to Minoan/Cycladic civilizations. They are worlds richer and more interesting than any of this stuff suggests. Its Wagnerian histrionics are as far from a true representation of Crete as Egypt’s priest-befuddled Atlantis tale. The genre is rightly called Apoca-Porn.

How many times and in how many ways can you see Thera explode and the tsunamis take down these landscapes and architectures, while Minoan lifeways and their visible values scarcely ever surface. How many authentic-looking but always-terrified islanders need to get blown off the screen (and I suppose, out of the way of manly history) before we realize you can only learn so much from hot winds of volcanic spew.

How many funding-checks can an educationally-senile millionaire sign for the same story over and over. This is what marketing people (without ever having asked) say the public wants—I suppose because to them catastrophe and death are what make living things interesting, and because Western behavior since Crete has been guided [sic] by Mycenaeans; meaning, a needless realpolitik of ”Raid Before Trade” and “Profit At Any Cost.” (Mycenaean civilization rose, peaked and collapsed in perhaps 1/4 of Minoan Crete’s lifetime). What’s “fresh” is what’s really old as mold in each of these remakes, tricked out in ever-more-violent new tech. The content, like a delusion in defiance of a far more interesting reality, stays fixed to numb the mass historical brain.

It’s so us. The endlessly improving techno-tsunamis that amount to standing water. A gesture to erase the longest continuous cultural period in Western history (with, by the way, the most peace and the highest average living standards) —from people whose money claims the authoritative presentation of history, while they apparently find the responsibility unbearable. I.e., that they’ll teach something, beyond the bludgeon-fact that history smashes everything.

I’d like to hear what they think they’re doing, but I doubt that they’ve wondered or been asked. Who needs the intellectual rigor or real grime of archaeology (which alone, by the way, can direct us toward facts) when producers inside the bubble, tapped out by careers in creative incest, assume that only Gotterdammerung Kreta XIX will carry the audience through each lucrative block of commercials? As a tiresome sort of American, I just have to keep remembering that (as with the “news”) the commercials are the whole point of this culture.

On one of many sojourns in Crete I spotted a particularly garish, ghoulish poster of the man-eating “Minotaur” in its Labyrinth. Seeing what Cretan people thought they had to present in order to attract hotel-tourists out to Knossos (the Vatican City of its age), I had to get calm and try to speak. This image (and “Theseus slaying the Minotaur”) is even the unit insignia posted in front of the military base near Iraklion, while actually it’s a Late Bronze Age logo from the island’s first invasion. A “political cartoon,” in Robert Graves’ phrase, that turned an ancient and complete lack of visible “kings” into the fake need for one. Hooray.

In truth, the vast majority of Cretans eschew this kind of game. But there I was, over-fond fanatical fool, respectfully explaining to the hotel staff that this was an invader’s insult to the facts. With listening and appreciation of the motive, they later took it down, although (God bless anyway) I suspect that it went back up. The tourists go in and come out in their same Mycenaean stupor, and so does the viewer of these horrifyingly-cheesy “archaeological quests.” On it goes with every globalizing year, as those tourists give less and less to Crete itself for her treasures.

We should ask what “cultural work” is getting done by these death-farces, what they accomplish—since getting to know the living culture in the program before it gets clobbered is but a wisp of their length and sadomasochistic impact. Romans and Early American newspapers called their prototypes ”blood sports” and “blood pudding.” Ritual death for the commoners’ terrorization and distraction. These productions are twins of the annual PBS tripe about (sigh, not again!) tracking down The Old Testament, Exodus, and the miracle-studded, mysterious but surely-peaceful emergence of you-know-who in the archaeology of Palestine. 

“I can’t show you, but I just know it’s all here!” gushes one of their recent narrators (with zero to show for a century of the most intensive archaeology in history). Yep, ya gotta toe the fantasy-line to keep that funding coming. Hell, if you did present what the current scientific facts amount to, what might happen to sales of our sponsors’ soap?

For that matter, what if he could show hard evidence of Old Testament fact and truth? In every atmospheric detail about Moses on Sinai, it’s clear that he’s engaged with a live volcano. Archaeology can’t even find that for sure. 

When lies begin to fail, they get bigger and more intense, insistent, violent. They multiply their dimensions, as if just enough of them at last will seal out planet Earth. Till these lies crash or Armageddon, maybe the stupefying “Bible Theme Parks” of the Holy Land today will include multi-sensory “participation rides,” like those in Hollywood for the Terminator crowds. I see a gargantuan Philistine Goliath and his goons terrorizing a roller-coaster car full of Nice Holy Truth-Seeking Consumer-Families, because of course they hate freedom.

Behind the tableau, an arm-in-arm line of sex-obsessed Canaanite women kick like Rockettes (in authentic Iron Age Dallas-Cheerleader skimp), jiggling and howling in front of a city background that shouldn’t be there. With each verse of their song a tiny army of carpenters hammer and whistle in blind syncopated rhythm as they plank together a skyline of new apartment-buildings. Cedars of Lebanon sway and swoon, yielding up choice fragrant lumber to The Lord. 

Over them all, a hulking dark idol of a Moloch with fiendish hot-coal eyes munches on a baby in a hot-dog bun. The chicks pop a mean Canaani can-can. They’re for Dad who pays for this crap and would rather be anywhere else. But once Goliath’s noggin drops (Ooooh! Aaaahh!), the Jezebels get theirs, and Moloch’s goons alike, from moral history. So ends the ride, and so re-commences the still-ongoing rescue of our benighted planet—headed by a fey, treacherous, horny but godly young hero who can really sling it.

I think this genre and its angels want to kill the Minoans, because—like Native Americans, with all their differences quarantined from “ours” in the mainstream West—they are a very bad example of fact in front of servants enslaved by fantasies.

Friends, our best boat still awaits, bound beyond Atlantis. Fake past, fake present, fake future, get thee behind us. There are far more facts and worthwhile mysteries in the lands where we really started out as human beings.

It’s how they lived that matters.

Stuck here in the mire of money-media, you can say anything you like about them (such is Freedomville), except that they really were richly, successfully there—before Greece or Israel, longer than Rome, older than Europe—digging the rhythms of cycles instead of dreaming disasters and other-where destinations.

Say anything except what might make a difference behind our living eyes.

A Minoan Bull-Dance, by Nyani Martin (original 3 inches x 2 inches)

     I’m proud to call Nyani Martin a friend and colleague in the world of Minoan studies. This article introduces you to the extraordinary art that “Ny” has created out of her engagements with Bronze Age Crete.

     Just before the long final period of Minoan civilization (that is, for a generation or two before 1600 BCE), some fresco-painters at Knossos Labyrinth worked in a relatively “miniature” scale as they played their parts in Crete’s artistic and ceremonial life. These painters inherited old traditions: keen observation of nature and the body, vibrant color-choices, and cunningly asymmetrical arrangements of forms that endowed a whole scene with dynamic motion.

     And yet, beyond the usual Minoan lack of interest in grandiosity, no one explains why the expansive tableaus in these works—priestesses dancing before a huge crowd, a festival-gathering of ladies at a magnificent shrine, and other scenes important to Minoans—were packed with so much charm into such tiny forms. Maybe this trend was simply like the 17^th-century fashion in Dutch painting whose challenge was to lovingly detail whole towns and landscapes on a scale no bigger than a modern greeting-card.

     Each of these original (scanned) examples of Nyani Martin’s art is painstakingly etched (somehow!) into a hard plastic panel smaller than your average refrigerator-magnet. And all of them reproduce the extraordinary impact of their Minoan inspirations (you can see and study many throughout Calendar House). When you study the Minoan originals (for example, in Cameron & Hood’s Knossos Fresco Atlas), you can hardly believe the skill behind the human hand that can render such precisely-observed lines, of nature and the body, in their worlds of sensation and movement—and on such an absurdly tiny scale. The closer you look at Nyani Martin’s art, the more you wonder at the same.

An Egyptian woman in a translucent beaded dress, Nyani Martin

     She catches just the right fold of a woman’s beaded gown across her thigh, and it becomes as translucent as light fabric. Among the bull-leapers, every limb and muscle, every crooked leg or lifted hand is an explosion of response to the red plunging force of the wicked-horned bull who’s plowing through their midst: the lines of the leaper sailing over bull’s back have the tension and grace of a classic Minoan body in its consummate arch. The bull-leaper’s helpers at center and right have joyful faces and their bodies are celebration, uplift, style— for they’ve done their part. But the curly-haired catcher at left yet remains to do hers, and her face is a question now to be answered about herself.

      As in much Minoan art, here we have finely-detailed individuals whose subjectivities and expressions are caught up in a great rhythm of living and ceremonial action. This is a cultural trait that seems to me the very seed of what today calls the spirit of The Olympic Games—where competition is never more worthwhile because of the surrounding spirit of cooperation. Where individuals triumph most in the conquest of human limitations.

Nyani Martin's conception of Kiya, poss. Cycladic wife of Akhenaten (original one inch x 1/2 inch)

     Nyani Martin does the homework. She knows that Kiya, one of the wives of Pharaoh Akhenaten—the man who tried to reduce Egyptian religion to one god, the sun—was a post-Minoan woman of the future Greek Islands, and the elegant portrait of her here is the tiniest of all the original works which Ny so generously gave me over the years of our friendship (it’s an incredible one inch by ½-inch in size).

Allomai, Near the Sea, by Nyani Martin

     “Allomai, Near the Sea” is a tender evocation of a pensive Minoan woman, with a tiara and textiles that (as in Minoan art) mark a figure of standing and knock your eyes out. She has a “sister” in the forlorn and yet charming “Ariadne” here. “Young Minoan Lady and Pomegranate” shares with them the Minoans’ love of pure color. I know of only example of a naked Minoan dancer (she is part of the amazing cosmic tableau carved in gold on the sometimes-debated “Ring of Minos”). But Nyani Martin’s examples here are wild evocations of high erotic spirits in religious contexts—and those are aspects of a Minoan sensibility detailed in another article here.

Ariadne Abandoned on Naxos, by Nyani Martin

 

Young Minoan Lady with Pomegranate, by Nyani Martin

     Finally, a “Minoan Family Banquet” presents a dozen different people at the imagined presentation of a child to elite religious figures (and baby makes 13). From the vibrant designs of their textiles and jewelry to the tiny cups in their hands, from the three-legged cook-pot to the Libyan hairstyle on the man at left, and the right side’s lyre-player, this is indeed a Minoan scene—a rigorously-presented and wonderfully warm gather of individuals in a unified (and unifying) event, which in all its “ordinary” detail expresses something of exquisite charm about being alive.

A Minoan Family Banquet, by Nyani Martin (original 3 inches x 2 inches)

     Nyani Martin also wrote a short but wonderful “imagining” about what happened at this Banquet, and it follows herewith.

     I have had the luck to meet with Nyani Martin a few times over the years since she first enjoyed Ariadne’s Brother—a modest, shy and striking young African-American woman who never stops learning and sharing her amazing work with others. And I hope that these masterful examples of her Minoan inspirations will freshen your eye as they do mine, for many more appreciations of our heritage in Minoan Crete.

***

Nyani Martin Describes the “Minoan Family Banquet”:

 

     Kylia sighed with happiness, and because her feet hurt; she leaned a bit against Tinea, who tightened her arm around Kylia’s waist,  holding baby Dyktis to her breast with the other so he could suck idly and stay quiet.

     Kylia was standing, despite being in her eighth month, because the family was having its feast of the winter solstice, in the Great Hall of their House, and was honoring its new mothers as it did at the quarter-posts of every year. Tulanis was carrying the ritual meal to them, carefully, slowly, trying with all her adolescent might to be stately, and Kidunatsa, the eldest and their Priestess (and Tulanis’  mother), was singing the private words to the Goddess before coming to  Kylia and Tinea to say the public ones.

     Kylia loved this ritual. During her childhood in a Mainland  fortress her mother and other Cycladic slaves had practiced a small smuggled version in secret. When she had come to the Family she lived with  them as a daughter before she married them, and had learned the fuller version and celebrated it for several mothers of the family, including Mother Elucea and Tinea on her first pregnancy. The eldest woman of the House or its Priestess and an adolescent girl, a “new” woman, offered a roasted liver and old-fashioned cereal paste cakes (made from toasted, crushed grain, rather than flour) to the household Goddess, on a stone plate, chopping the prescribed four herbs (for this time of year, fennel,  thyme, sage, and hyssop) with a ground stone knife. The liver was sliced  and sprinkled with the herbs, and then the ancient-style food was offered  to the mothers near birth and right after, as the Priestess blessed them. It nourished their souls and promoted their fertility and milk. It was ancient, as could be seen from the food and the equipment, no copper or  bronze used, only flaked obsidian and ground stone, and it was beautiful.

     Surrounding them were their family, the children watching  and wandering, the adults clapping and singing a hymn of cheer;  Tanaui Sti was strumming his harp as he leaned against the Mother Pillar. Aristion came up to stand with Kylia and Tinea, one hand on each  of their shoulders. This time, the liver was that of a fat duck, since that was what Elucea had chosen to roast, though they also had a joint of beef forequarter from the family down the mountain, who had slaughtered a  bullock and traded sections to all their neighbors; far more meat than they usually ate of a meal, but then it *was* a feast. People had their first cups of wine or broth from the stewed beef, and pieces of warm  flatbread to dip; soon, after this ritual, they would start in on the stewed beef with its vegetables and cooked dried milk-wheat, eating it  with flatbread and raw lettuce from the garden, eating the duck with yeast bread from the starter that had been Tinea’s dowry from her birth family, apples and grapes.

     Later they would have yogurt from cow’s milk, with rosehips  stewed in honey and put through a strainer, and fresh dark figs and  pomegranate seeds, and resinated wine with mead and small round balls of cannabis-honey-date sweetmeats to promote love and fertility and the return of the sunshine. Kylia was very hungry, still making up for the three  months of her pregnancy when she could barely eat, and looking forward to  the meal, as delicious scents wafted into the Hall from the courtyard and the kitchen behind it.

     Tulanis reached them, flushed and blushing and beaming;  Kidunatsa came up behind the girl to put a hand on her shoulder and sing the blessing to Kylia and Tinea, invoking the Goddess as Mother in them,  praising their fruitfulness. Kylia and Tinea took a piece each of liver and of cereal cake, kissed each other, and fed each other, as their  family cheered, and  the child within Kylia kicked to add its own  comment. She caught her breath, swallowwed, and felt as if even heavy with child as she was she could fly on her family’s love.

     Kidunatsa took the remaining liver and cereal cakes to the Ancestors’ pillar in the center of the room, its gray stone carved with a sixteen-pointed star and double axes. Tulanis scurried to her sister, who  was stirring the simmering tripod pot, to fetch a cup of broth, and hurried to catch up with her mother; together they sang to the  Ancestors, their voices haunting, strangely twining like snakes in the old ululating song, as Kylia listened with her head laid back onto Aristion’s shoulder. Kidunatsa laid a small piece of each food at the base of the pillar, and poured the cup of broth into the offering-hole. Then she turned to the family and grinned, as Elucea came in, right on time, bearing the roast duck on a broad painted platter. “Let’s eat!”  the two women said together, looking at each other, and the Family cheered. Kylia cheered too, and sat down to eat.

Excerpts from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last book of essays, “The Trumpet of Conscience,” 1968—This from “Nonviolence and Social Change,” 1968:

     …Of course, by now it is obvious that new laws are not enough. The emergency we now face is economic, and it is a desperate and worsening situation. For the 35 million poor people in America—not even to mention, just yet, the poor in other nations—there is a kind of strangulation in the air. In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society. Now, millions of people are being strangled that way. The problem is international in scope. And it is getting worse, as the gap between the poor and the ‘affluent society’ increases.

     The question that now divides the people who want radically to change that situation is: can a program of nonviolence—even if it envisions massive civil disobedience—realistically expect to deal with such an enormous, entrenched evil?

     …I intend to show that nonviolence will be effective, but not until it has achieved the massive dimensions, the disciplined planning, and the intense commitment of a sustained, direct-action movement of civil disobedience on the national scale….

     …The only real revolutionary, people say, is a man who has nothing to lose. There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.

      Beginning in the New Year, we will be recruiting three thousand of the poorest citizens from ten different urban and rural areas to initiate and lead a sustained, massive, direct-action movement in Washington, D.C. Those who choose to join this initial three thousand, this nonviolent army, this ‘freedom church’ of the poor, will work with us for three months to develop nonviolent action skills. Then we will move on Washington, determined to stay there until the legislative and executive branches of the government take serious and adequate action on jobs and income.

     A delegation of poor people can walk into a high official’s office with a carefully, collectively prepared list of demands. (If you’re poor, if you’re unemployed anyway, you can choose to stay in Washington as long as the struggle needs you.) And if that official says, ‘But Congress would have to approve this,’ or, ‘But the President would have to be consulted on that,’ you can say, ‘All right, we’ll wait.’ And you can settle down in his office for as long a stay as necessary.

     If you are, let’s say, from rural Mississippi, and have never had medical attention, and your children are undernourished and unhealthy, you can take those little children into the Washington hospitals and stay with them there until the medical workers cope with their needs, and in showing it your children, you will have shown this country a sight that will make it stop in its busy tracks and think hard about what it has done.

     The many people who will come and join this three thousand, from all groups in the country’s life, will play a supportive role, deciding to be poor for a time along with the dispossessed who are asking for their right to jobs or income—jobs, income, the demolition of slums, and the rebuilding by the people who live there of new communities in their place; in fact, a new economic deal for the poor.

     …I have said that the problem, the crisis we face, is international in scope. In fact, it is inseparable from an international emergency that involves the poor, the dispossessed, and the exploited of the whole world.

      Can a nonviolent, direct-action movement find application on the international level, to confront economic and political problems? I believe it can. It is clear to me that the next stage of the movement is to become international.

     National movements within the developed countries—forces that focus on London, or Paris, or Washington, or Ottawa—must help to make it politically feasible for their governments to undertake the kind of massive aid that the developing countries need if they are to break the chains of poverty. We in the West must bear in mind that the poor countries are poor primarily because we have exploited them through political or economic colonialism. Americans in particular must help their nation repent of her modern economic imperialism.

     But movements in our countries alone will not be enough….So many of Latin America’s problems have roots in the United States of America that we need to form a solid, united movement, nonviolently conceived and carried through, so that pressure can be brought to bear on the capital and government power structures concerned, from both sides of the problem at once. I think that may be the only hope for a nonviolent solution in Latin America today; and one of the most powerful expressions of nonviolence may come out of that international coalition of socially aware forces, operating outside governmental frameworks.

     …In practice, such a decision would represent such a major reordering of priorities that we should not expect that any movement could bring it about in one year or two. Indeed, although it is obvious that nonviolent movements for social change must internationalize, because of the interlocking nature of the problems they all face, and because otherwise those problems will breed war, we have hardly begun to build the skills and the strategy, or even the commitment, to planetize our movement for social justice.

     …In this world, nonviolence is no longer an option for intellectual analysis: it is an imperative for action.

Governor Patrick's Proclamation of May 1st as Thomas Morton Day in Massachusetts

Greetings! Governor Deval Patrick has issued a Proclamation declaring May 1st to be Thomas Morton Day in Massachusetts—in honor of this intrepid and good-humored Englishman who made a success of his trading post by treating Native Americans with respect, while his peers of Plimoth and Boston were starving behind the walls of their needless colonial forts. See the full Proclamation—plus, a bit of “How To Make Revels Happen in Your Community,” and some live music!—at AncientLights.org, on its “Revels at Merrymount Today” page….Drink and Be Merry!

Agrimi or wild goats, Middle Minoan II sealstone

          Enter ancient Minoan Crete—for at least 1500 years, the most peaceful and progressive center of Western civilization—and you find a people in love with their world. In love with nature; with the varieties and colors and delicate strength of plants; in love with the animal and human body; and, with the living connections among them all, so vibrantly clear across their arts and images.

        That’s what I mean by erotic in these reflections (many more examples at http://ancientlights.org). In the Minoan world, desire is more than just the urge to have sex and/or procreate. The Minoan Erotic is a visible awareness and joyful embrace of the overwhelming powers of nature that eternally drive, connect, and renew the worlds of life around and within us.

        Nobody since has so closely, lovingly observed and captured those powers in their arts. And I cannot find another people who so celebrate even their own defeats in trying to master and control those powers and their world.

        Minoan religion and arts are profoundly not interested in the self-perpetuating, power-hungry ego. What they celebrate is the opposite: the ritually-induced release from individuality, and an ecstacy of being that is overtly erotic and spiritual at the same time (ek-stasis, or “standing beyond oneself”)—a cosmos that both nurtures and ignores the individual, that vibrates with inseparable sexual energies and spiritual epiphanies.

Knossos Labyrinth in Crete (circa 1600 BCE), a ceremonial site inhabited since The Stone Age

        Maybe such a powerful Erotic shouldn’t surprise us in a culture so devoted to ceremony, feasting and drinking, to dance and music, socializing and sports—or, among people so devoted to just looking good, from their men’s beautifully-woven kilts to their women’s tight-waisted bell-skirts (which unfold to the shape of a double-axe), open-breasted garments, elaborate makeup, jewelry and coiffures.

A Minoan trader in Egypt and a Cretan woman in a flounced kilt

        Swaying trees, flowering plants, ramping animals. Soaring birds and darting myriads of fishes, busy honeybees, thundering bulls, the rippling bright blue waters of their seas and mountain streams—all these subjects in Minoan arts revel in existence and in relation with each other. The scenes below, exquisitely rendered on a pair of golden drinking-cups, can show us several levels of a Minoan Erotic.

Minoan-made golden 'Vaphio Cups' with scenes of a failed bull-capture

          The olive and palm trees themselves on both cups are alive with observed details, with rhythms and textures of their own (unmatched in later art). Into this garden baited with a trap walks a kingly bull. Instantly he’s being seduced into capture by a cow, set up in his path by cunning human beings with the muscle and nerve to take him on. These were the people called boukoloi or “herdsmen,” “worshippers of the bull god” (from whom we derived the word bucolic).

        The bait-cow lifts her tail with invitation (she must have been chosen for this dallying part when the moon was right), smiles and nuzzles the big boy sideways. The dope is already in a daze. But, before Bull can remember where he thought he was going, his hind leg is looped with a snare, and the lady who fooled him into it has vanished. So much for Minoan utopias.

           Yet look what happens on the matching (lower) golden cup. At center, the net snaps tight on Bull, and flings him ass over horns, too—yet, out of “the same body” you can see at left, he explodes right out of the net full-force, to toss and trample the clown who pulled this trick and stole his girl. At right, Bull takes off after her in his best flat-out flying gallop (the palm of victory his that day), and his back-hooves kick out some contempt behind him for those annoying human idiots. Now, where was I!

          This is the story that a powerful rich somebody wanted immortalized in solid gold? Why? Perhaps these cups of unmistakable Minoan workmanship commemorate people killed in such perilous pastimes. Yet, they were found not in a Minoan tomb, but on the Mycenaean mainland (at Vaphio)—as if they were in use “above ground” in Crete but eventually taken away as golden booty. We might also conceive of a master Minoan artisan working in mainland circumstances, on commission or in captivity. Whatever the case, these are literally cups of good cheer in the face of failure. What they communicate is anything but funereal. They satirize the human will to mastery and, in characterizing the most powerful and dangerous creature on Crete, portray it as charged with sexuality, not to be tamed, blithely destructive and, above all, magnificent.

          I don’t know who more than Minoans would devote such wealth, labor and acquired skill to a status-object engraved with the human farce—again and again, in sensuous rhythms that leap off the object into life, in laughter and unheard music that link and move every body in the scene. You can say, the more trivial the subject, the clearer the “message” that Somebody can waste such resources to show off. Or at least, you can say that.

Minoan lyra-player with dancers

Late Minoan Marine Style and a Vegetal Labrys-Wheel

          Even their most sacred symbol, Labrys the double axe, became a wheel of life sprouting shoots. (And you can explore the Minoans’ natural, religious and cosmic wheel of lunar/solar time in the chapters of Calendar House, at Ancientlights.org). The organic and the symbolic, the body and the quick flash through it that we call life, must have each other: they are inseparable. Sir Arthur Evans observed that Minoans much-identified themselves with plants—a very different idea and experience of life than the ones we inherited (after the Minoans’ burial) from Homer’s heroes, down to the current crop of walled-up doomed imperial citadels, where elite egos rival in destructive competition on a planet of plenty.

Spring corn poppies, Lasithi Plateau, Crete

Late Minoan gold ring from Archanes near Knossos

           The Minoan Erotic includes danger (ask Bull), suffering and loss. But even those images vibrate with a rhythm and life that is greater than their incidence. Minoan art sheds blood, yet every example flows in ceremonial context, with a meaning related to an aspect of life. All around them are natural and man-made medicines for pain, ways to share and celebrate the growth of a hard-earned knowledge—how the circles of their world fit into the cycles of the universe.

Minoan women and men on sealstones possibly of 'sacred marriage'